The other day, I noticed I was being negative when I complained to others and in my head about someone being late to a dinner gathering. The complaining went something like this, “Where are they? Why aren’t they here yet? They usually arrive early, why so late this time (when I am so hungry?)”. I remembered that being hungry usually got me edgy. Therefore, I decided to get some food in me, so I would be more pleasant for the rest of the evening. It worked.
That’s what happens when our self-awareness expands. We become more sensitive about how we behave and catch ourselves early when we act negatively. We notice that unhelpful comments we make left and right are probably polluting the space we share with other people.
Let’s think before we speak and take ownership of how we feel without whining to have our owns issues magically fixed by others, just like we did when we were kids.
We are adults now.
Month: June 2021
What to do when you don’t like your job?
When you don’t like your job that waking up in the morning becomes a burden, you might need to change your job. We spend so much of our days at work, that means you need to enjoy what you do at least half of the time.
It’s a fact, we all get tasks and bosses we don’t like. But if all your tasks feel painful, and all your interactions with your boss seem horrible, you need to seriously consider finding a new job.
Your job does not have to be your calling or the reason you were born. Even those do who find their passion in life are advised not to quit their day job to relieve themselves of the pressure of making money off their passion. At least, not until they can match their current income or exceed it. Elizabeth Gilbert was the best to talk about the difference between a job and calling. You can have both.
Finding a new job is a challenge and you need to be actively seeking new opportunities and putting yourself out there. You also need to be patient until you get that new job that excites you, where you excel and shine.
But what should you do until then?
What if changing your job is not an option at the moment, and you still hate it?
- Remember your why of keeping this job: What freedoms, privileges, possessions do you currently enjoy because of your job and the money you’re making?
- Remember the value you add to your workplace with the role you have. If you don’t see it, think what would happen if you are gone, will you be missed?
- If you don’t think you will be missed, that means you need to step up. Create new tasks to start adding value in a way that only you, with your personality and experience, can add.
- You can make those tasks the reason you start liking your job, let them be play to your strength points.
- Think about the people you interact with on a daily basis, you are in each other’s lives temporarily, and for a reason. How can you interact with them in a genuine and meaningful way?
- How can you make your coworkers’ lives easier, starting with your boss? Be proactive and surprise them with your thoughtful actions.
JOY
When an idea presents itself to me more than once in a couple of days, my ears perk up, and I listen. This time, it seems I need to take care more care of being aware of and creating JOY in my life.
Here are the passages that presented themselves to me from three different sources in less than 24 hours:
“We can make joy and gratitude a daily habit and standard simply by measuring how often we cultivate such emotions. Several times each day we can assess our success by asking, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much joy and gratitude am I bringing to this moment?”
There is power in this wording. We are not asking how much joy and gratitude we are experiencing in the moment, as if we are somehow entitled to such high emotions. We are demanding personal responsibility—how much am I bringing?”
-Brendon Burchard, The Motivation Manifesto
“Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.”
-Maria Popova, Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings.
“Joy for human beings lies in proper human work. And proper human work consists in: acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirrings of the senses, identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.”
– Marcus Aurelius.
This week, I will ask myself often: “how am I bringing joy to this moment?”
I wrote the word JOY in my weekly planner and listened to this amazing Joy song this morning to keep it alive in my heart and mind.
Choose Joy.
What do you want to be true?
What do you want to be true about your health?
What do you want to be true about your finances?
What do you want to be true about your spiritual life?
What do you want to be true about relationship with———?
What do you want to be true about your home?
What do you want to be true about your career?
What do you want to be about your knowledge?
What do you want to be true about your impact on others?
I loved this goal-setting/habit-setting question I recently learned from the author Jon Acuff.
It’s a lot like the amazing question I learned from Atomic Habits:
Who do you want to be?
Best Gift
Finally, I got to feel that summer break has officially started as we enjoyed the first full weekend without any due homework or assessments to prepare for. I feel like the Universe created new hours, wrapped them up, and offered them in a shiny box for me. I am grateful for the gift of time.
I slept more, played with my kids more, and happily got overdue chores done. Please note the word “happily”.
Maybe not all summer weekends will feel as blissful. I am just taking the time, here is that word again, to honor the freedom to create our own schedules for the coming weeks.
Let’s make the best of this gift.
Help
You are in resistance mode to your new reality.
You want out.
You want to sleep and wake up to a world with this new reality having vanished in thin air.You can’t believe this is how it going to be from now on. You don’t think you can take it. It’s too much to live in a world where this new reality happened. You wonder “Is it even OK to keep living normally now after this happened?”.
Everything reminds you of what you lost or about to lose. Your new reality. You try to escape it with denial. You act as if no new reality took place. But your body acts up with ugly habits, you eat too much or sleep too much or smoke too much. The dread is still there. The grieving. The regrets. They are not going away. You want to feel in control again, as if you ever were. You want yesterday back, before you knew what you know now. Before you made that decision that will cost you for years to come.
Then it hits you. You realize nothing you do will change what happened. This is your new world.
You still find it hard to go on. You need a new kind of strength you feel you don’t have.
So you look up or, if it makes you more comfortable, you look within, and ask for help.
You ask for help to wake up in the morning and function. You ask for help to be able to see things differently because you still can’t. You ask for help to remember there is so much good in the world to warm your heart of ice. You ask for help to remember you are loved and lovable no matter what mistakes you made. You ask for help to contribute again and give back to the beautiful people in your path.
You believe your call for help is received the instant it leaves your lips. You trust that help is on the way. You accept your new reality.
The very special post
I wanted to write this post 2 hours ago, so I started a 30-minute session of focused music on Brain Fm as usual. Few minutes later I paused the music to receive a 15-min call from my friend. Afterwards, as I opened the word document I use to draft my daily posts in, I remembered that a few weeks ago, before my 30-day free trial ended, I used to write on Scrivener software and that they were about to release a brand-new version for windows, the first major update in years, so I went to their website to find that lo and behold it was indeed released, so I paid for the license, downloaded the new shiny software that will absolutely help me write better and fired it up. The software was beautiful.
As I normally did, I hit F11 to use the full screen mode for writing. Unfortunately, the background was dark now and I didn’t’ like it or that I couldn’t change it in options. Therefore, I spent some time looking up the manual to change the background of the composition screen to white, with no success. I had to DuckDuckGo it to find I had to have a JPG image of white to use as my wanted backdrop, so that’s what I did.
Now, I was so ready to write my post.
However, I decided to clean my keyboard first, because I forgot to tell you I spilled some coffee on it yesterday and, although I cleaned it well, the letters D and Z were still sticky.
So here you are, one clean keyboard later, reading how this brilliant post got safely to your browser. It was a long journey of excuses on the way, but I think my writing got better, don’t you think? 🙂
Can you laugh about it?
When you notice your neurotic thinking and behavior, can you take back a few steps and watch it as something peculiar happening inside you? Can you disidentify with it as you the person and realize it is an experience you are simply having at this moment? Can you remember that this too shall pass? Can your observing self watch it with curiosity and wonder? Can you notice how these feelings are making your heart beat faster and your mind unfocused and your breath shallower? Can you look at this experience as yet another lesson in patience and self-acceptance in all your states? Can you take it lightly and not be so serious about it? Can you laugh at this particular human experience you’re having that is making you this uncomfortable? Can you let go of the thoughts that are keeping you hooked to this state and taking you away from being present? Can you breathe very slowly, watching your belly filling up with air with every inhale and deflating with exhale? Can you remember you are strong enough and went through harder times before, so you will be okay this time too? Can you repeat this sentence to yourself “May you be well my friend, may you be safe, may you live in joy and peace”* until you feel calmer?
Sure you can.
*Tibetan “lovingkindness” meditation mantra.
Spark Yourself
This is an excerpt from a wonderful book I read 4 years ago called book “How to Live a Good Life” by Jonathan Fields about a life quest the perplexes most people which is defining their passion and purpose. I learned from Jonathan and the author Elizabeth Gilbert and many others that we can only follow our curiosity as a guide to find things we enjoy doing with passion, so here it goes:
“Time for you to spark yourself! What are the things that you want to invest time, energy, money, and effort to do, learn, or participate in more? Answer as many of the following questions as you can. Truth is, it’s often easier to have fewer sparks, because then you spend less time trying to decide which to devote time and effort to. You can still contribute to the world in a way that lights you up.
If you find yourself struggling to answer for present-day you, answer for 12-year-old you. Sometimes by the time we reach adulthood, our true sparks are buried so deep we have forgotten how to see them. Reconnecting with your inner 12-year-old, without regard to whether adult society holds your answers valid, can be a great place to start.
- Am I curious about anything in particular?
- Is there a big question I’d love to answer?
- Is there a problem I feel compelled to solve?
- Are there things that fascinate me? Is there a topic or field or thing or pursuit or even a person that I have a deep yearning to know more about?
- Are there activities that I get lost in?
- Are there things I love to do where I lose track of time and would pay to be able to do more?
- Is there something I want to master? Is there an art or field or pursuit I’d love to be really good at, maybe even world-class great?
- Is there some person or community or being I feel compelled to help? It doesn’t have to be human; it could be an animal, a plant, or even a planet.
Look at your answers, then ask how you might be able to weave more of the things that spark you into your days.“
Note: Spark Yourself is the title of the chapter I took this excerpt from. I totally forgot how amazing this book was until Readwise app reminded me of it.
I love the word Spark which is why I named my weekly newsletter “The Sunday Spark”, subscribe to it and check the archive here.
Gratitude Note
This is a note of gratitude for the end of this unconventional school year. For homework-free weekends and evenings. For zero notifications from Google Classroom. For quiet parents’ WhatsApp groups. For possibilities and a real hope this is the last time our kids go through this kind of remote learning.
We did it.
Thank you teachers so much, you learned so many new skills in no time to keep the learning process as smooth as possible for our kids. Thank you for your massive efforts and patience with us.
Thank you my dear parents in law for taking care of our kids during their online school hours while we were at work and especially for the delicious meals.
My dear kids, I am so proud of you both. We went through so many ups and downs together, because while I love to teach what I learn, I found it so hard to teach you what you learn, especially in the first semester, when online teaching was so foreign to us all. Thank you for bearing with me as I learned what worked best for you and your energy levels and rhythms. Thank you dear daughter for being responsible and managing your classes while I was at work.
I love you both and cherish you. Summer break here we come.