Want to Change the World? Start with Yourself!

A practical guide on what to do when you feel you got out of balance

It’s been a while since my last update. Have been going through some big changes in the meantime giving me enormous amounts of things to think and eventually write about, but – as it frequently happens – you get this problem of choice. What is going to be the following subject that I’d like to write about?

And then this one somehow came up quite naturally… ‘Begin with changing yourself if you want a better world around you’ might sound very cliché, but is not a bit less true because of it. This simple rule applies in my opinion to one’s career as well as personal life very well. 

If you turn to coaching, for instance, or are busy with personal development in some other ways, you would hear it rather often that it’s all not so much about what happens around as how you react to it and what you think about it. If you cannot change the situation, change your attitude to it and it’ll get better or will be solved by itself this way or another.

Though in general this topic seems to be of a more psychological nature, spiritual even, if you will, but the practical application of it I suggest here might be a good guideline for those who are, like me, convinced that by harmonizing your inner world your life somehow starts getting better. It cannot but also do good to your career if you learn to notice and register these mood changes and learn how to effectively deal with them.
 

A lot of things people frequently report regretting are things they do or say in anger, out of hurt feelings or revenge. Well, maybe you do find your boss or a colleague an asshole and would sometimes feel the urge to let them know it, but before shouting out the worst things at them, mind this great saying I literally translated from Russian ‘think twice before spitting into a well, you might just as well need to still get your drinking water form it’ implying that broken relationships are difficult to fix.

Call it magic, but have you ever experienced anyone willing to do you wrong while you were smiling your shiniest smile and being all happiness? On the other hand, when you go out with a big frown on your face, slouched posture, feeling blue, sad or irritated, you’d probably notice all kinds of misfortunes come your way, starting with a flat tire, missed train or unheard of rudeness of a cashier.
 

Without going too deep into why this happens and whether or not it could just be a not scientifically proven coincidence, let’s just assume that’s how it goes. Consequently, this means you could influence how much good or bad luck you attract and take your own responsibility for it.

This might be more of a female thing, obviously affected by (monthly) hormonal swings, but I think that men would recognize having those days too, when things are falling our of your hands, nothing would work out and bad luck and misfortunes seem to be haunting you. Or even worse, the days when you feel angry and annoyed and at some point would actually like to kick somebody’s ass… Well, you can’t expect much positive feedback from the rest of the world then, can you? In this case it should be a sign there’s something not okay with your inner world and that it might need a little adjustment. If I starting feeling like mentioned above, I’d say to myself ‘and now we need to go and neutralize this dangerous bomb called Anna’. Advised by a smart book once, I made a list of things that I know can help me harmonize my inner world in order to also make the world around me nicer. Please find my ‘recipe’ below and feel free to borrow ideas or get inspired by it.

1. Take a power nap or go to bed very early. This one is very simple: in a rested body there’s only space for a rested (read: positive) mind.

2. Have a nice long walk outside, alone or with someone nice (and preferably not too talkative J). The combination of moving (yay, some endorphin for free!) and changing scenes can have an unexpectedly distracting, calming and pacifying effect on you.

3. Go running. If you have never done it in your life, start building it up really slowly and gradually, but give it a chance. If you get into it in a way that it’ll really become your habit, you can even notice some ‘addiction’ affect rising up. But don’t worry – those are of rather ‘harmless’ addictions!

4. Yoga + meditation are my own top of the list means to get in balance again, but that is very personal. I’d say: give yoga a try one day if you haven’t done so yet, whether you are a girl or a guy (yes, yoga for men is uprising and winning more and more popularity!). I could talk for long hours about its benefits, but let it be the topic of another post.

5. Clean your world! And with that I mean cleaning in the broader sense of the word, both physically and digitally. Start tidying up your desk or your living room. Wash your windows. Have a look in your closet and garden or your car and your handbag (yeah, ladies, our handbags, they speak tons about their owners). Maybe the desktop of your computer or folders need a little or a major cleanse too? Have you ever thought of how many unnecessary contacts you still have in your phonebook or people you don’t have contact with in your Facebook friends list / Twitter followers / to be continued? Backing those up if necessary and then deleting gives such a liberating feeling! Throw away, sell or give to charities some stuff you are not using any more – it could actually make someone happy and grateful! In other words, make room for new things and people in your life by getting rid of those you don’t seem to need any more (be careful not to hurt somebody’s feelings though if you decide to for example unfriend them).
 

6. Go offline, like completely offline, don’t touch your smartphone, laptop, say good-bye to social media and switch off the radio and TV. Try even not talking to anyone for a day or a part of it. And try to embrace and enjoy the silence. You’d be amazed to find out how often we just create some noise at the background and stop noticing it. This one could be a very resourceful experience!

7. Go dancing. Even if you have never danced in your entire life, just go somewhere with loud music and crowds of people in the swinging mood and get yourself moving. Doesn’t matter what it looks like, people are not watching (most are busy looking into their smartphones anyway). You’d notice your troubles vanish tune after tune and your bad energies dissolving leaving you in a rejuvenated state of freshness.

8. Go shopping. Uhm, this one is to be taken with care, financial care especailly. But – in reasonable amounts – this one sure works great by me.

9. Meet up and talk to a good friend and/or do one or more of the things from this list together. Friendship + sharing help balance your world like few other things in this world.

10. Do nothing. Just nothing. From time to time it’s a great way to recharge, unplug and recalibrate.

Those are my own top 10 ways to rebalance myself and I encourage you to make a list of your own, to really put it down and look into it every time you notice you need to start feeling better again.
 

Do you have your best ways to deal with ‘getting out of balance’? Would be amazing if you’d like to share them in the comment!

10 Reasons Why Teaching is Rewarding

It’s been a while since my last career update and a lot has happened in the meantime. Among other things I’ve got a new job, have been meeting new and exciting people and acquiring new experiences, but most of all I’ve been exploring quite some new skills and also applying those to making a living.

In order keep one’s employability high, which is becoming a must in these times of an overall job market flexibilization, one needs to stay flexible too and keep training those adjustability muscles. Literally, this means to continuously develop various sets of skills and not only rely on those capabilities that proved to earn you some money once and for a while provided some financial security. Following this idea, I’ve tried not to get rusty and changed the field of my expertise a bit, which would mean utilizing different skills than those I used in my previous job.

Though I’d certainly need a different set of skills in my new marketing and sales role than those I needed as a market researcher, it’s not those skills I wanted to talk about. As mentioned in my previous posts a while ago, I’ve been re-exploring teaching on a number of occasions and in different forms and couldn’t but notice how rewarding it was. That is why I decided to write about it and explain why I thought so.

My attitude to teaching as a possible occupation varied considerably at different periods of my life. Next to the fact that I’ve had some amazing teachers to learn from, starting with my high school mentor, my English teacher from high school and university and my yoga teacher as of late, there were people who wouldn’t recommend becoming one based on their own experiences. My diseased grandma, for instance, an elementary school teacher herself who’d been teaching for more than 40 years at a Ukrainian village school. Upon hearing that I started a teacher training at a university, she persistently told me to, if at all possible, become something else but a teacher. Not good for your nervous system, she said. But then again, my poor granny had to teach like all the subjects on her own, to the first and third graders at the same time and in the same classroom too! No wonder she’d get some overwrought nerves issues after all, given the circumstances.

So I listed to my granny and didn’t become a teacher back then. I’ve studied some more and explored market research as an industry later on. But as an advocate of the so-called ‘hybrid employment’ I wrote earlier about, at some point I decided to see for myself what it felt like to teach. To find out that teaching could actually be great! Training my successor-to-be at an old job, giving yoga classes to a couple of friends and then to a group of 10 and finally becoming a part-time English tutor for secondary school students I’ve been in quite some ‘teaching’ situations to find out.

Not sure whether I’d still be that enthusiastic about teaching if I made it my fulltime job, but for the time being, combining the above-mentioned ‘episodes’ of teaching with a part-time office job I’ve been more than enjoying it. For those who might consider teaching or are doing it already I came up with a list of 10 reasons why I find it rewarding. Here they are, explained:

1. If you want to learn something really thoroughly, you’ve got to start teaching it. Having to teach something makes you the best student you can be of the field in question: that’s when you’ll really get to the heart of the matter of whatever you are trying to grasp. Just ask me why I decided to take up a yoga teacher training? That’s why!

2. Seeing people you are teaching have progress gives you a kick. Like your students writing a composition in English with only minor mistakes while they couldn’t put down two sentences just a while ago? Indescribable!

3. Usually it’s not only the subject specific knowledge you are providing, it’s much more personality building what you do than you might think. You cannot teach English well without teaching someone the discipline of looking up every unknown word he or she comes across. The same applies to yoga: discipline here is the key.

4. While teaching you are observing yourself at the same time, noticing skills you miss to become more efficient. Just think of the best wording to explain a grammar rule or talk your yoga students into an asana. It’s comparable to holding a mirror in front of yourself, a great self-reflection practice, no doubt!

5. You are training your listening skills a lot and those might come handy not only to a teacher, but to a successful sales person, a project manager or a HR professional as well.

6. You develop patience and that one is considered common good in our fast moving ‘action-reaction’ society, where ‘instant’ is rapidly becoming the new ‘good’.

7. Trying to find a right approach to different people you are becoming more open-minded. Another great quality and totally in line with the idea of training those adjustability muscles.

8. You are not only teaching out there, usually you are learning from your students a lot too. How do you think I found out what Snapchat was or the latest Dutch slang? Right, from my English students!

9. Money you earn teaching might not be as much (or it might also be a lot, depending on what it is you are teaching), but it’s gratitude and progress of those you teach that are most pleasing.

10. Teaching is rewarding, just because it is! Go and try for yourself if you haven’t yet. Teach an older relative or neighbor to use Facebook or a smartphone application, lead a teenage soccer team or train your colleague to use the software you know well. Enjoyment most likely guaranteed!

Do you recognize the points I highlighted here or did you have any of these experiences while, either formally or informally, teaching something to someone? Please do share your thoughts in the comments: I’d be very excited to find out!