Black Life Coaches: How to Shake the Midday Blues

We all have been there! It is around 2:45pm and the day has begun to wear on you; your eyelids are heavier than ever and you feel as if a simple nap would cure all of life’s issues. But of course that is never an option considering your manager is expecting work from you by the end of the day. I feel your pain. I am known for my 3:00pm battles with the sleepy’s. I want to share a few tips that can help us all avoid falling asleep at the wheel during those long hauls Monday through Friday:

(1) To have a better afternoon, start the night before: What most of us fail to understand is the importance of a decent night’s rest. Science has proven the brain/body combination is in desperate need of recharging daily to operate at a peak level. If you forsake that, you are running an eight cylinder on two or three cylinders. Go to bed tonight!

(2) What you put in your body in the morning will visit you this afternoon: It is so tempting to grab a doughnut, cookie or other snack as we dash to work. In fact, society has made it harder to eat any healthy alternatives. But that is no excuse especially considering all the diseases that are directly linked to our eating habits. Try something ‘alive’ in the am; fruit coupled with your usual eggs and going light on the meat products. These will make digestion easier by the middle of the day.

(3) Get up and get moving: This is one of my favorites. There is nothing like a brisk walk around the block right when you feel the sleepiest. The blood circulation will get moving and your heart will start pumping fresh oxygen to the brain. The next thing you know you’re bright eyed and ready to finish the end of your day strong.

(4) Get your laugh on: I read an article a few weeks ago in a magazine detailing how important laughter is to our daily survival. You’d be surprised to hear how many people go days and even weeks without a single chuckle. Laugh involves several key muscles and releases powerful endorphins throughout your system that feed cells and make you feel better. Laughter is really great medicine for the mid day blues.

I’m sure you may have a few more tips of your own that get you through the day. Add these to your arsenal and just watch your productivity soar. We can beat those blues with a little preparation so have fun with it.

See you at the top!
Cherese

About the Writer
Cherese L. Jackson is the co-founder of New Direction Coaching Associates. (BlackLifeCoaches.net)

Five Brilliant Brothers You Should Know By Now (BlackAmericaWeb.com)

This is hardly a definitive list of smart brothers, but we wanted to give props to a few we knew across the age gamut who've contributed mightily to overcoming the stereotype that black men can’t be intellectual. These brothers read, write, teach and speak and do their part to brighten up the world with their brilliance.

Hopefully, you’re already familiar with some of these names; if not, we encourage you to check out their work and enjoy their intellectual capacity. This is a group of men not celebrated for their hoop skills or their rhyme prowess, but for their very, very sexy minds. We salute and celebrate these men of letters.

There's more where they came from, we know. But let's take a minute to give these five bright brothers their just due. By the way President Obama is excluded from this list, only because we already know that man is brilliant - after all, he’s our Commander-in-Chief.

Michael Eric Dyson

If People magazine ever did a "Smartest Men Alive" cover, we know Michael Eric Dyson's face would be on the cover. This Chicago-born black man has the flow of a rapper in his speech, he uses vocabulary words that you usually on see on the SAT, and he's a prolific writer. Oh, and did we mention he's also a Baptist minister? What the man can do with words is extraordinary. He's so sweet with his words, if he wasn’t a scholar, he’d make a mean pimp, but maybe he’s already a word pimp, selling his intellect to the world, ya dig?

Dyson, 53, a Princeton graduate, is a speaker, thinker, professor, author, cultural critic and more. And sorry, ladies, he's also married - to the equally brilliant Marcia Dyson. Well, we said he was smart, didn’t we?

Follow him on Twitter @MichaelEDyson.
Recommended Reading: "Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip-Hop."

Derrick Ashong

Ghanaian-American Derrick Ashong, 36, rose to national prominence the new-fashioned way – via a video that went viral on YouTube. In 2008, when a reporter asked a casually-dressed young black man on the street outside of a Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles what he thought of then-Sen. Obama's campaign for he White House, he probably didn't expect an articulate, point-by-point analysis. Well, that's what he got - to his visible surprise. (Since removed from YouTube, you can see a clip of it here at 2:26.) The Harvard graduate became a symbol of the youth movement that helped Obama get elected.

Since that moment, Ashong, who is also a musician, has become a radio host, hosting "The Derrick Ashong Experience" on Oprah Winfrey's Sirius XM Radio channel and a TV host on "The Stream" for Al Jazeera English. After returning to Harvard for doctoral studies, Ashong left to focus on his music, his public speaking and media career and his other projects.

Follow him on Twitter @ashong. Click here for his follow up to that original video, and click here to read his blog.

Dr. William Jelani Cobb

Dr. William Jelani Cobb has been on the academic scene for years, although his face may not be as well-known to those outside of Spelman College and academic circles. The longtime Spelman professor of history is now at Rutgers University, his graduate alma mater, as an associate professor of history and Africana studies. It's a lengthy title, but one this 35-year-old Queens native deserves.

He just recently appeared on Melissa Harris Perry's eponymous new weekend morning show on MSNBC, and we’re hoping to see a lot more of him on TV as the Obama campaign heads down to November.

Follow him on Twitter @jelani9. Click here to watch him on "Melissa Harris Perry."
Recommended Reading: "The Devil and Dave Chappelle."

Marc Lamont Hill

He’s only 33, but don't let his youth fool you. Marc Lamont Hill is a smart brother who cares passionately about the state of black America. The host of the nationally syndicated show "Our World with Black Enterprise," Hill is one of the nation's leading black scholars. The University of Pennsylvania graduate is now an associate professor of education at Columbia University. Education, particularly of black youth, has been a priority for Hill. He formed the My5th to inform underprivileged young people about their legal rights. Hill was one of the people who advocated for the early release of Shaquanda Cotton, a 15-year-old indefinitely sentenced to a juvenile correction facility after a fight with a teacher.

Follow him on Twitter @MarcLamontHill. Click here to watch him on "Our World With Black Enterprise.
Recommended Reading: "Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity."

Charles Ogletree

Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree has been head of the "smart brother" class for some time now. The 59-year-old director of Harvard's Charles Hamilton Houston institute for race and justice is the author of several books, a lecturer and a scholar. He also has the unique distinction of teaching both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama - then Michelle Robinson - when both were at Harvard.

Ogletree often lectures on legal topics and is considered one of the foremost legal minds in the country, if not the world. His most recent book is about the implications of the arrest of his colleague, Henry Louis Gates, and the infamous "beer summit" with President Obama that followed.

Click here to watch Ogletree interviewed by Soledad O'Brien.
Recommended Reading: "The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America."