Tag: experience

Living Intentionally

Accidents happen all the time, but what if we choose to live our life in accident mode? We wake up dreading the day ahead of us and looking forward for the escape of sleep, just to realize that the lack of awareness while sleeping makes those intensely sought for moments insignificant. And we carry on looking for some real experiences when our most cherished present is the present moment.

The routines we build and do mindfully or mindlessly create the map for our life. It doesn’t take a fortune teller to anticipate what our life will be 10 years from now. Our life unfolds the way we see it in our mind and what we see in our mind is reflected through how we live our life. It can take extraordinary effort to love ourselves and start developing positive self-talk and beliefs of achievement that will help us overcome our condition.

Leaving our life to chance is a losing bet. It allows producers, employers, family and friends to feed off our backs, of our energy. Let’s use our creative energy to become our highest version of ourselves and go full speed in changing what we see and what we do to improve the world around us.

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The Effects of Personal Growth on Others

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

Cultures in which status differences are seen as the doom of relationships embrace a fixed way of thinking. The belief that two people from different backgrounds, with different education and wealth cannot mix might sound archaic, but it’s still present. It might not be as obviously exposed, but remarks such as – what if he or she gets jealous, what if you have to give up your career or all your hard work? What if you need to stop growing? These are all questions that show a fixed mindset projected on others.

Self-growth is a personal experience. Those around us can decide to join us, put us down or observe us from a distance. It might be challenging pushing forward and connecting with other people that we resonate with at a different level, but it is often necessary. We shouldn’t shy away from putting our own self-growth first and other people’s feelings about how we live our life second.

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Are You Comfortable and Are You Growing?

Photo by Andrew Seaman

Ever since we’re born we are being looked after. We associate modern society with comfort and mistakenly generations of parents associated comfort with a positive upbringing, not realizing that this limits their children’s ability of growing.

But reaching adulthood and wanting to stay comfortable even when comfort might mean being overweight, being time poor or financially poor or having low immunity should make us reconsider our choices. It is counter intuitive that eating less (and intermittent fasting) or cold showers is associated with longevity of life, and that not settling for decent wages and the ‘safety’ of employment but taking risks instead attracts growth, but science shows us that some of the things that come as natural to us are not doing us a favor.

It’s time to look at a full 24 hours experience and evaluate your day: how much of what you’re giving your time to serves you well? What can you dispose of to make room for growth? It’s up to us to change how we live our life. Even with different influences around us, it’s time to take ownership over our own beliefs and build our own path. Why not start now?

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Taking in Other People’s Experiences

Photo by Toa Heftiba

‘We can only learn from our mistakes’

If that was true, how come we can easily repeat not only the mistakes that we know other people have made, but – let’s face it, our own mistakes.

With the same principle in mind, we should be able to learn from different sources rather than through putting ourselves at risk unconsciously. I came across an YouTuber reaction to their videos from 10 years ago. There was no harsh criticism and I admired that, but when the 10 years younger self said ‘I’m so busy with school, I don’t have time to do more videos’, looking back they actually remembered people making fun of the videos at school. This allowed my own fear of failure to surface – all the ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘Why would anyone appreciate my work’. The little voice that whispers insecurities in a scripted loop.

Hearing another person’s experience about facing their own fears taught me more about pain and pleasure, the balance between what we perceive and what we allow others to project on us than any self-growth book. It sometimes takes unexpected triggers to help us address our fears and these triggers don’t always have to come from our lived experience.

Listen. There’s more going on than it meets the eye.

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Are All Opportunities Worth Pursuing?

Photo by Markus Spiske

The rational answer is ‘no’, but our natural instinct often says otherwise. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves in making sure that we don’t miss out on opportunities. If you’re at the early stages in creating a business, the culture of many entrepreneurs can be hard work rather than smart work.

Think about how much more effective would be to work those extensive hours on smart work. Every human interaction is an opportunity to learn, but the lesson might at times be that you’d like to do things differently. Learn from other people’s burnout before experiencing it yourself and understand that long hours at a low productivity rate are counterproductive.

The more opportunities we pursue, the more we increase our chance of success. If we can’t put in much effort into any of these chances, we are at risk of covering too much ground with too little attention to detail. Knowing our limitations means that we can turn our assets into great advantages.

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The Teachings of a Bad Book

Photo by Christin Hume

Bad books are more generous with information than good books are. They give the reader the mechanics that keeps the fictional universe to a standard of coherence that was set by our perceived reality.

Are you half-way through reading a book and you’ve lost interest? Ask yourself what elements of the book turned it into a painful experience rather than a pleasurable one.

Is it the plot? The characters that flattened inconsolably or out of contrary, the cousin coming back from the dead at a point in the novel when the convention wasn’t set to expect such a twist.

It’s not just structural information that a bad book gives away, but also the thinking process of the author. It is a more intimate experience when a book deconstructs itself in front of you, leaving its author standing naked from words and structures, in the most human way possible. Pick up a book and don’t worry if it’s a bestseller or not – they all serve a purpose.

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