Year 2013: Summing It All Up

Next to the charming X-mas cards, warm and cozy family and friends dinners and lovely wishes for the coming 2014 this nice and sweet December time is all about, one cannot but come across all kinds of reflections on the old year, top-something lists of the best and most memorable moments, varying from sports, the news, television, radio hits to the year’s overview in pictures and events for each of your Facebook friends. And sometimes it does go too far if you ask me, but given the fact that turn of the year has some certain kind of magic to it (at least to me it still does), this summing a year up seems like a reasonable and useful thing to do. As it also just feels good to do so, let me follow my fellow bloggers and all other people who deem this end-of-the-year ritual important and reflect on my 2013 in this very final end-of-the-year post.

This year started out in big uncertainty for me as I quitted my old job in the last days of 2012 and was feeling both sad and excited about it at the same time. As I’m a kind of person who seeks security, it was not quite encouraging to think I’d stay without steady incomes for a while (aside from some unemployment benefits I could count on for some time). On the other hand, all endings mean beginnings of something new, which is why I was elated to a certain extent. And as long as after 3 months of job-hunting I was still unemployed, it made me reconsider how much I disliked my former job and, under slightly adjusted employment conditions and modified responsibilities we got back together with my old employer, which was a great decision after all as far as I can evaluate it now. I’m still working there part-time as a market researcher. This might not be the work of my life and my career has been standing somewhat still this whole year, but I feel productive and get a chance to carry out some really cool things at work from time to time, while still having enough free time to enjoy other nice things in life (and thanks God my boyfriend has his job by the way, otherwise this half-freedom wouldn’t be that very affordable financially). And as to my professional self, which is why I’m writing this blog in the first place, I’m still searching and still enjoying the process…

Another great thing that happened this year was the revival of my blog, the one I started a couple of years back as a means to reflect on my ‘being a late starter on the job market (in a country I emigrated to)’ and then suspended successfully after just one post… Well, this year I had so many career-related subjects I got truly interested in, found out a lot about and couldn’t but share with the rest of the world that I just decided to dust off my good old blogger account and start writing again. Judging by the reactions I received and most of all by the therapeutic effect this revival has had on me, the blogging has got to go on in 2014 as well. One post per month seems also like a frequency easy to keep up with.

In 2013 I also travelled a lot and quite far, like never before, spending most of my savings on trips :). Ah well, you only live once, right? I’ve been to my birth country twice, went skiing in Austria for the first time in my life, flew to Prague all alone, visited two of the Dutch Wadden Islands, Terschelling and Texel, which I never did – shame on me – in almost 8 years I’ve lived in the Netherland, but most exciting of these all was my Grand American Journey along the West Coast of the USA. These trips alone have made my 2013 a year never to forget, full of exciting memories and moments to cherish.

 

My next big discovery of the year – can it still go any further? – was yoga. It’s not like I only encountered yoga this year, but it’s the depth of it I began to discover. Starting with an inspiring yoga weekend in July, I found out there was more to yoga than just an ordinary practice once a week in the neighborhood’s gym. I started looking for an in-depth training or a course and found one. In October I got enrolled in a yoga teacher training that I am still enormously excited about it and have managed to build up my own independent yoga practice so far. I’m not sure yet whether there’s anything I’m going to do with it career- or money-making-wise, but I already gave my first yoga class to a friend of mine and she said to have liked it. To be honest, I found it a pretty exciting experience myself, so who knows what the future in a role of a yoga teacher will bring me…

Though I’ve been job-hunting for quite a while without much success as I pointed out earlier, I have found a new job eventually. I’m starting as a tutor of English for the secondary and high school students on the very last day of this year. And even though it is a small part-time job I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills from, it’s also trying out something new, something I used to be good at in the past and something I hope to again enjoy doing. Boy, I’m thrilled about my first lessons – I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.

As this whole blog is about searching for vitality and most possible happiness one could derive from an occupation, preferably the one that could also make you a proper living, I cannot quite say I’m there yet. But nonetheless, reflecting on 2013 I can say that I’ve done a lot of exhilarating new things, met some great and inspiring people and managed to expand my comfort zone more than in years before. I hope this could be a good example to some: only trying things out you can figure out what’s best for you and not being afraid to let go of the things that are not. Probably the most important thing I came to realize this year is that happiness comes from within and you and only you are the one responsible for making yourself happy. Looking for stuff in life that makes you feel good, being grateful for the nice little things that are already there and concentrating on what’s positive and good rather than on what’s missing makes a huge difference. Absolutely grateful for this wonderful year full of great insights, revelations and experiences that have helped me grow. 

Have you also experienced some great things this year that have made you grow too? I’d be excited to find out! Thanks for being with me in 2013 and I wish you all a great and prosperous, healthy and successful 2014!

Introvert vs. Extravert: Which One Has More Chances to Succeed?

Ever thought of whether there’s an expectation or prediction to be formed of how successful one could become in their professional and personal life based on the fact whether they are an introvert or an extravert? I’ve been wondering about it a lot and more inclined to think that a correlation between being an extrovert and being successful is pretty obvious. This comes by and large from a – at least in the Western society – traditional idea of success associated with being extraverted rather than introverted. However, as some research I did on this topic reveals, this issues is much more nuanced and subtle than it might appear at first. My belated November blog post is therefore devoted to the topic of introversion vs. extraversion as related to the professional success as well as personal well being in general.

Just a little introduction of the concepts and their history to start with. Through popular psychology and colloquial use the terms introversion and extraversion are nowadays known and more or less clear to the general public. As major dimensions of human personality theories, the terms had been popularized by Carl Jung, though both popular understanding and psychological use of the concepts differ somewhat from the original definitions. Simply put, extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behaviors, whereas introversion – in more reserved and solitary ones. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a psychometric questionnaire designed by Myers and Briggs based on Carl Jung’s description of psychological types, is a generally used tool to ‘diagnose’ a person’s degree of introversion – extraversion.

If you rely on most of self-improvement books on how to become a successful and effective individual, it seems that most of them are promoting an extravert type of behavior to some extent. Feel free to disagree with me, but behaviors like being proactive, taking initiative in contacting people and undertaking equivalent actions can hardly be described as solitary or reserved. Basically, what it comes down to in order to succeed professionally one has to be good at selling things, whether it’s selling yourself to a potential employer or your product or service to a potential customer. Wouldn’t you therefore expect a perfect salesperson to be an extravert? To my astonishment, I read this article, claiming that this in my opinion very logical expectation is not exactly true. Best salesmen are evidently to be found in the middle of the introversion – extraversion scale! Just read the article if you also are intrigued…

Scoring somewhat in the direction of introversion myself, I’ve always been interested in this: knowing yourself, is it smarter to adjust your life, both privately and professionally, to fit the kind of person you are or is it possible / desirable to try and change by practicing some more ‘marketable’ (read: extravert) behaviors?

Well, obviously no extremes are good. You can always ‘train’ yourself in certain things, also in being more outgoing and therefore slightly more of an extravert. Also, if for instance you are not comfortable calling people on the phone for professional or business purposes, practicing by just doing it helps. No wonder: like in most matters practice makes perfect. If you are extremely introverted, you’d probably be better off in an occupation having more to do with technique, substances, data or even animals than with people, while the contrary would be true for the opposite side of the scale. The in-betweeners would presumably fit in a wider range of professions, with some accents on their particular role depending on which end of the scale they tend to more.

You could also choose to move to a country, which is more introvert or extravert friendly. I came across this lively discussion on a forum: Western countries, like USA, Canada and the most of Western Europe are said to be more extravert-oriented, including Scandinavia, with only Germany agreed to be an exception. Asian countries, like China, Korea and Vietnam, contrary to what might be expected, are reported to be rather extravert-focused: leaving other people alone for too long is considered not done there and therefore is the social aspect in these countries pretty strong. Thinking of Ukraine where I was born and grew up, I’d say that introversion is not necessarily a crime there, given that people do not talk to or smile at total strangers, but again, there’s more to a culture than just establishing contact with people you don’t know and so I prefer not to generalize it this way.

While success and happiness are quite subjective notions after all which I’m certainly planning to discuss a lot more in the upcoming posts, it stands to reason to conclude that arranging your life and work appropriately around being either an introvert or an extravert would be most efficient given that the most important difference between the two is in the ways they recharge their energies. 

What’s your idea of the influence of this interesting personality trait on our life? Any thoughts or experiences with how introvert or extravert friendly different countries are? I’m very interested to find out!