Post by: King Siu, Communications Coordinator, PMAC

Our final keynote, motivational speaker Darci Lang, talks about the steps that we can all take to live happier lives. Darci admits that she wasn't always as happy and fulfilled as she is now; her life has been full of bumps along the way, but she has persevered through it all.  During her speech she tells of how instrumental her father's advice was to her whenever she found herself at a low point in her life.

Key pieces of this advice were:

• Don't complain about your job in front of your children. This will teach them that they should expect to be unhappy in their work later in life and that this is normal. It's not.
• Don't let others get you down. Misery loves company: if you're looking for a crowd to accept you, find one that is happy and trying to make the best of their lives.
• Don't complain about something unless you're going to do something about it. Darci has created a rule for herself as a result of this and doesn't allow herself to complain about anything more than three times unless she's willing to follow up the complaint with a solution.

One interesting revelation that she found, being constantly on the road for her work: she has found that how hotel staff treat her children's belongings is an immediate indication of how happy they are in their roles.

Darci recounts a tale of staying in an out-of-the-way, forgotten motel in rural Saskatchewan and how she had met a maid who had worked nearly all her life there and was one of the most content people she had ever met. An example of how this was shown in her work was that she had taken the trouble, when she made up their room, of arranging the children's toys around their beds so that they would feel more at home – even going to the trouble of setting her son's toy robots in several well thought-out action sequences on the dresser. Never before or since has she ever experienced that level of work pride. She was clearly an example of someone who was full of happiness, and had more than enough to spread around for those who met her.

At the end of her uplifting talk, Darci left delegates with a quote from international author and speaker Dr. Wayne Dyer, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

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