3 Easy Tricks to Help You Fall in Love With Your Job Again

3 Easy Tricks to Help You Fall in Love With Your Job Again Article by Pete WheelanTrying to climb the corporate ladder? Warning It can be a dangerous distraction. Promotions dont always increase your job satisfaction or nurture your passions. In fact, the added responsibility can end up driving you further away from finding meaning in your work because youre too busy to even consider it.Americans in particular are under immense pressure to be chronically busy. Last year, 55 percent of the U.S. workforce left 658 million vacation days unused. If you value advancement but never figure out whether moving up will help you bring your passions to play in what you do, you might lose all sense of purpose. This is not an uncommon herausforderung fewer than 20 percent of leaders of organizations feel passionate about their individual purpose, and many of them cant even articulate what that purpose is.How do you find the passion that can fuel you through distrac tions and an exhausting pace?1. Note How Challenges Make You FeelEven if you love your job, some aspects of it will be difficult or unpleasant.As the saying goes, thats why its called work. You need to figure out how those challenges make you feel. Are the parts you hate the norm or the outliers?Connecting your work to a larger personal goal can help you avoid procrastination or laziness. Finding a job youre so passionate about that every task seems easy isnt a bad idea, but its an awfully high bar to clear. Its important to feel that the obstacles ahead of you are worth overcoming for reasons beyond a paycheck.To gauge how Im feeling about my daily challenges, I use a simple 22 matrix high or low energy and positive or negative mood. High/positive (in the zone) or low/positive (calm and relaxed) are the spaces I want to be in as often as possible. Something I feel highly energetic and positive about is a passion, whereas something I feel highly energetic but negative about is typic ally a major stressor. By consciously assessing patterns that emerge, I can identify the aspects I want to adjust or recalibrate.If youre feeling low energy and negative but need to push through, try my solution I head to an email folder I have labeled Fuel, where I save emails from grateful employees, students, and satisfied customers. These inspire me by reminding me why I do what I do to have a positive, tangible impact on the lives of students by helping them unlock their potential.2. Actively Create Opportunities to ReflectAt the end of each day or each project, evaluate how you feel about the way you spent your time. You probably wont be exuberant and energized every single day, but if you never feel that way or regularly feel frustrated and tired, you could look for a new job or you could draw on a deeper commitment to impact a broader big-picture goal that is deeply and personally meaningful to you.Reflecting in this way will help you see patterns of likes and dislikes, whic h will help you navigate a maze of opportunities to find the kind of future you want for yourself. In one study demonstrating this phenomenon, adults participating in a puzzle-solving game performed 18 percent better than their peers on consecutive attempts when they were given time to reflect on their past performance. This method of reflection has helped me make wiser career pivots.Case in point Over the course of my career, Ive worked for six companies. During three of those five job transitions, I took several months off to reflect on my passions and evaluate whether my next job would align with them. Often, the next opportunity I pursued meant taking a reduction in pay, level of responsibility, or title all things conventional wisdom advises against.When I left my job as a management consultant to start my own company, I traded a big salary, an office, and an executive assistant for working from my apartment with my cofounder unsupported and essentially without pay.By reflecti ng on my purpose, though, I found ways to calibrate my passions with what I would be doing for a living. This understanding allowed me to immerse myself in my work without reservations, even when making a zur seite hin gelegen move. With that kind of enthusiasm, the pay raises and promotions followed naturally.3. Tap Into Your Inner Circle for a Reality CheckAsk your partner, friends or family members for candid feedback about their perceptions of how you feel about your career and what your passions are. What topics do they frequently see you genuinely excited to discuss? When do they see you light up and get into a flow?You might think everything is going fine, but our loved ones are often better at understanding what makes us tick than we are. Take advantage of their years of knowing you to find out whether they see your passions lining up with your work.For example, say you really want to be excited about a promotion you recently earned, but instead youre feeling wary and anxiou s. Your close friends might be able to help you be more honest with yourself and figure out where the disconnect lies.Although you cant change the world or your life every day, by integrating your passions into your work using these strategies, you can consistently take incremental steps in the right direction. If you dedicate yourself to finding your passion and follow it wherever it leads youll never leave your desk at the end of the day wishing things were different.A version of this article originally appeared on SUCCESS.com.Pete Wheelan, CEO of InsideTrack, has dedicated his career to leading mission-driven, high-growth companies focused on helping individuals live up to their full potential. Before joining InsideTrack, he served as chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at Blurb, a groundbreaking leader in unleashing creative expression through self-published books.

Research into Kids Knees Could Prevent ACL Tears

Research into Kids Knees Could Prevent ACL Tears Research into Kids Knees Could Prevent ACL Tears Research into Kids Knees Could Prevent ACL TearsEvery fall football fans keep an eye on the news to watch for season-ending knee injuries. Over the last few years, torn anterior cruciate ligaments ended the seasons of stars such as Julian Edelman, Deshaun Watson, and Carson Wentz. While these injuries are high profile, the athletes most likely to suffer an ACL injury are the so-called pony-tailed hooligans. In the United States, the highest incidence of ACL injury is to females 14 to 17 years old, many of whom are soccer players. In fact, females of all ages suffer these knee injuries between two and seven times mora frequently than males.Read ASMEs Top Story Air Taxi Aces Test FlightKatie Kitchen, a research assistant at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center, instructs a high school soccer player to perform a squat for a 3-D motion analysis assessment.Surgery is often required to repair torn ACLs, and surgeons are working with mechanical engineers to better understand the physiology of childrens knees in order to better repair the injuries, or avert them entirely. ansicht engineers and biomechanics specialists are applying techniques normally reserved for hard materials like steel to soft tissue.Ellen Arruda, a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan, has research interests ranging from mechanical behavior of materials including polymers, elastomers, and soft tissue to tissue engineering of tendon and muscle constructs and to modeling of growth and functional adaptation in soft tissue. But she also collaborates with surgeons who conduct ACL reconstructions.The most often cited reason for the increase in these injuries is an increase in the number of children playing sports such as soccer and basketball, year-round, sometimes on multiple teams at once, she said.Read ur Readers Pick YouTube Star Goes Viral with Glitter BombGreg Myer knows the value of engineers to surgeons. Myer is a biomechanist who serves as director of research at the Human Performance Laboratory for the Division of Sports Medicine at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center, and he holds a position at the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati.Mechanical engineers can do many things to support the surgery, the first being helping surgeons select the correct ligament graft, Myer said. But Myer is also studying the way young athletes zulauf and jump and kick to find ways to learn how ligaments can be spared from excess stress to begin with.Were working on the prevention side, he said.The map of the knee looks more like a complicated interstate highway interchange than a simple joint, with four bones, thigh and calf muscles, bits of cartilage, and the meniscus that cushions the bones. Ligaments thread around and between the bones to keep the femur, tibia, fibula, and patella togetherbei and play a critical role in stabilizing the joint during loading.The ligaments include the posterior cruciate ligament, the medial collateral ligament, and the lateral collateral ligament. But the anterior cruciate ligament threads through the middle of the joint, making it difficult to see and susceptible to injury. Its the most-often torn ligament in the knee and in sports. Typically, the ACL is injured during landings that involve rapid deceleration and direction change.Full tears of the ligament tissue require complete surgical replacement if a return to physical activities is desired.Theres a lot of debate over the best graft for this, Myer said. The patella tendon that attaches the tibia to the kneecap is a common choice, and the hamstring tendon has increased in popularity, and then theres also the allograft from a cadaver.Listen to the All-New ASME TechCast podcast Innovations in Biomaterials Create New Roles for EngineersCurrent methods of ACL replacement generally work well, as they stabilize the knee and allow people to return to sports. But the graft replacement technique doesnt work for everyone, especially kids because theyre still growing. Grafts from a cadaver have the highest failure rates, with estimates of about 20 percent.We think the grafts are too stiff, Arruda said. Its usually an adult cadaver graft going into a young child, so its overdesigned for that child in terms of stiffness.The ideal replacement for a torn ACL restores native anatomy and function to the knee. Mounting evidence, however, suggests current strategies alter the biomechanics of the joint.Instabilities are thought to develop over time through a graft tissue that becomes more lax than the native tissue through loosening, mechanical degradation, or both.As a result, young athletes are at a greatly increased risk for a second ACL injury. Nearly one in four youths who return to high-risk sports sustain another ACL injury at some point in their career. For patients younger than 20, the increased ri sk for sustaining an ACL graft rupture is as high as threefold, with the risk higher for females than males.Read More on Innovation Drone Deploys in Just Minutes but Flies for HoursEngineers are working with physicians, surgeons, and other healthcare professionals to better understand the biomechanics of ACL injury and how to repair it more permanently.Mechanical engineers can help with the tensile strength of the graft and help us learn how the graft degrades over time following the reconstruction and before it starts to build back up in strength, Myer said. From the surgeons standpoint, helping them understand the best grafts is probably the most direct link to helping in their selection for reconstruction.Experiment and SimulationKaitlyn Mallett saw this first hand, as she previously worked as a graduate student research assistant in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. With Arruda as her advisor, she went on to get her doctorate in mechanical e ngineering. Her dissertation research involved experimentally characterizing native ACL and replacement grafts to define their mechanical properties.Its a challenge researchers have been grappling with for decades.The ACL is actually quite complex, Mallett said. Its made up of two different sections that twist on each other, and as you flex the knee, it twists and untwists, but its always taut. Its very complicated to get the mechanical properties without relieving that tension.Understanding the relationship between the various parts of the knee requires a combination of experiments to characterize the mechanical properties of the tissues and plugging those values into a computer models that employ finite element analysis to simulate the stresses that running, jumping, and landing place on the joint. Even the model is informed with clinical data.The model starts with an MRI of the knee, Arruda said. We convert that into a finite element mesh and translate that from the MRI data file to volumetric elements used in finite elements. That involves taking every slice of the MRI and finding the outline of each tissue in the knee. We call that segmenting the knee.The model is made of elements that are deformable, so you create the overall geometry and break it into elements and then apply properties to each section, Mallett added.Read More on Bioengineering The Engineering Behind Brain ResearchTo obtain the data on the mechanical properties of the tissues, Mallett took donated tissue and cut out all the soft tissue except for the ACL. She aligned the ACL in a well-known loading state and then subjected it to tests to provide the mechanical properties needed for a computational model.Some of this may sound like working with traditional engineering materials, but Mallett said there are important differences. Ligament tissue doesnt display co-linear behavior like steel in the linear regime. The ACL has several different kinds of parts to it that dont behave the same way .Its also non-linear, meaning it doesnt exhibit a one-to-one response when strained. Soft tissue like ACL is compliant and begins to stiffen as you pull on it because it has a crimp in the fiber that straightens out.That nonlinearity is difficult to capture, Mallett said.It also exhibits a time-dependent response. If you pull it more quickly, it will behave differently than if you pull it slowly. By taking a large number of samples and pulling them to a certain distance, I was able to get the stress-strain curve, she said.Risk FactorsExperimental biomechanics is also helping inform the way post-surgery rehabilitation is conducted. Theory says rehabilitation after ACL reconstruction should focus on addressing the underlying neuromuscular problems that led to the injury. Myers lab at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital was established in part to put those theories to the test.Instead of just looking at the problem, Myer said, we look at the mechanisms causing it.Working with children and yo ung adults, the biomechanical engineers study these athletes as they mature to look for physiological changes. They also do full body motion analysis, and if theyre injured, they determine the biomechanics that led to the injury.Landing in a knock-kneed position is the number one risk factor for injury, Myer said.With this data in hand, the biomechanical engineers have begun to explore steps athletes can take to prevent injuries from occurring. Myers team recommends performing neuromuscular training, which is basically strength- and power-building exercises that translate into support to reduce the risk of injury.Our research has shown we can reduce ACL injuries by more than 50 percent by doing these, Myer said. Ultimately, we dont want the ACL to be loaded that much. We want the forces to be absorbed to the bone structures and the muscular activation.Read More on Teens and Limbs Young Engineer Takes Great Strides with Prosthetic FootArrudas team is looking at another knee injury ri sk factor repetitive loading. That means that ACL injuries are essentially a fatigue failure.Engineers know that in metals, repetitive or cyclic loading at a load lower than the yield or tensile strength can lead to failure. Biomechanical engineers at Michigan and elsewhere are studying fatigue in the ACL to learn more about these failures in pliable human tissues.How a ligament accumulates damage is still unknown, Arruda said. Once we understand that, we can start thinking about the concepts we apply in fracture mechanics of other materials to understand how much damage a ligament can tolerate.How would fatigue occur in a knee? If you play high-intensity sports year-round doing essentially the same move over and over again without sufficient rest and recovery time, you may be at risk as a young part of tearing a ligament, Arruda said. The overall hypothesis Im trying to explore is that the damage can and does accumulate, and healing can occur as well, given time.A third side of the knee equation is also coming into focus, Arruda said. Engineers are engaged in tissue engineering solutions to replace a torn ACL. Thats also something Ive worked on, again with collaborators including an orthopedic surgeon and faculty members in the med school.Their research has spun off a startup company called STEL Technologies to commercialize the technology. We developed a tissue-engineered graft that could be used as an ACL replacement that actually remodels and grows in vivo to restore native biology and function, she said.Armed with better knowledge of what causes ACLs to tear, trainers and physicians will be able to better prevent the injuries. Athletes will be trained to run, jump, and land in ways that spare the ligaments from overstress. Physicians will constantly monitor the knees for accumulating damage and prescribe measures to mitigate the risk.My vision is to one day have an MRI be a routine part of a young athletes annual checkup. Using a patient-specific computat ional model of the athlete and replicating her biomechanics, we can assess her injury risk, Arruda said.The hope is to one day relegate ACL injuries from the sports page to the history books.Tom Gibson, P.E. is a consulting mechanical engineer specializing in machine design and green building based in Milton, Pa. Read More Exclusive Stories from ASME.org Five Job Interview Questions Young Engineers Can Expect Lighter Axle Reinvents Drivetrain. Does motown Care? Engineers Making Waves in AquacultureMy vision is to one day have an MRI be a routine part of a young athletes annual checkup. Prof. Ellen Arruda, University of Michigan