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!

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!

Keywords of October: Inspiration, Change of Direction and Hybrid Employment

In order to keep up with my internal planning and publish at least one post per month, I need to hurry to still fit it in October. I’ve been long speculating on a topic for this one, and finally things are starting to crystallize. This time I’d like to talk about inspiration, change of direction and a very promising emerging form of employment that has caught my attention lately and was on my mind, before I even knew there was a term for it – hybrid employment. To my mind, these three things have to do with each other, follow me and I’ll explain why I think that.  

Inspiration

As the darker days come and wintertime becomes effective, we are inclined to seek more tranquility and slow down. At least this should be happening according to the logic of nature’s cycles. No wonder, most of us have difficulty getting up in the morning, might have less energy during the day and might even feel melancholy from time to time. To keep up with what you are doing in daily life with the same output you need things to inspire you to get your energies high again.

I get inspired by people who are living their jobs. I’ve come across a couple of great inspirational examples of such people. One of them is Michael Stevens, the founder and creator of the YouTube channel called VSauce. An ordinary, now 27-year-old American guy, who was probably bored with a mediocre office job and at the same time genuinely curious about how things in this universe work, created a YouTube channel a couple of years back and became incredibly popular with it on the Internet. He makes videos relating to various scientific topics, as well as gaming, technology and other topics of general interest characterized by a very authentic and engaging storytelling style. He asks and answers questions – some of them kind of silly, while others getting you really involved – with genuine spontaneity and directness of a child. Just try watching some of the movies if you don’t know VSauce yet – a lot of laughing guaranteed!

Another example of a person living her job, or rather work of her life, is Irina Verwer, a practicing teacher of different yoga styles and a vegan cook, writing blogs and books about yoga and nutrition. I discovered her website by chance some time ago and found her really cool and inspiring, just to find myself sitting next to her – you don’t believe in coincidences either, do you? – during the first weekend of Anusara Yoga Immersion. It is the first part of my two-year’s yoga teacher training that I started following about a month ago. Irina told me how she found it such a gift to do what she really loved and I decided I’d be looking as long as it takes to find this feeling for myself. Thanks for inspiring me, Irina!

Change of Direction

So as I mentioned earlier, I decided to do something less mind-centered than my current occupation and thought yoga was that something I was looking for: it seems to suits me because of the harmony and discipline, the former of which I seek and the latter of which I think to posses. As I also wanted to deepen my understanding of it, a suitable way for this seemed to follow a teacher training as I believe that one can best learn something in case he/she needs to teach it to others.

A kind of future I’m picturing for myself is thus a combination of a nice part-time office job and giving some lovely soothing yoga classes a couple of times a week. Seems like a perfect work-work balance, doesn’t it? More about similar job combinations in the following section.

Hybrid Employment

It turns out it’s not weird I’m thinking of some kind of combined career for myself. While job-hunting, I’ve seen quite some professional profiles of people on LinkedIn and was amazed to find out how many people have two and more things filled in on their company’s line. I thought of it as an emerging trend and I was right. Recently I’ve talked to someone who pointed out an NRC Next article to me where the term ‘hybrid employment’ was used to refer to people having two or more jobs at a time or having a little business of their own next to a regular job.

As individuals tend to get more critical about the place work takes in their lives and want it to have way more meaning than just earning a living, they long for more variation in what they do and want to possibly utilize most of their skills, abilities and ambitions. And sometimes those just don’t fit in one particular job! That is why some of them are creative enough to make up a professional reality that meets those needs.

Google, for example, encourages their employees to work on a project of their own some certain percentage of their time on the job. Another combination of professions that has become pretty common in the last couple of years is the one of part-time teaching next a job in a related industry. It actually seems like a very attractive one, for both teachers as well as their students. As NRC Next article about hybrid teachers claims, one stays more focused if different roles have to be fulfilled interchangeably, while at the same students, for instance, can benefit from the first-hand field-related examples in class.

One could think of quite some great ‘hybrid’ advantages, like enhanced vitality of professionals and lowered risks of burnout as a result of variation in activities. Also building up expertise in different disciplines makes one more flexible on the job market and thus better employable during his/her entire career.

One could also think of less positive consequences of the above mentioned flexibility though. As you spread your focus between two or more different professional roles, you might slow down your progress in each of them. You might have less chance to get promoted for example or miss out on things that happen in your absence. But maybe if hybrid employment becomes more and more the norm in the future, fulltime versus part-time employment will become less a criterion to judge one’s performance and deliverables.

What’s your idea of hybrid employment: a myth as you cannot succeed in a certain aspect of life unless you give it your fullest attention and effort or an enriching and productive way to combine more things that you like doing and are capable of? Let’s discuss!

And by the way: Happy Halloween to all of you!

Life Long Learning: Open Courseware Rules!

Inspired by the month September and the beginning of an academic year, I decided to write about learning, a subject that has always been important to me and kept me interested. Don’t know how others experience it, but about a year after I graduated from college, I noticed I was missing something. As I’d come to realize some time later, learning was that something I was missing. Learning in a broader sense of the word, like acquiring new knowledge and integrating it with the knowledge you already possess.

The following seems like a plausible explanation of the reason I missed it. If I’d describe myself in terms of developmental psychology I studied at school, from the moment my leading activity changed from play to learning (at about age 6 or 7), I’ve been learning stuff all the time and most of the time quite intensively. From foreign languages to different college subjects – I seemed good at learning things. What I also came to realize later on is that acquiring new knowledge was something I found truly joyful. As the story goes, I didn’t have to miss learning for too long, as I enrolled in yet another college study and enjoyed it to the fullest – for another 4 years, to be exact. 4 years filled with courses, exams, papers and doing research. I couldn’t have been happier!

In a later stadium, when you leave school and start working, you generally continue acquiring new knowledge in a lot of ways, though of a more practical and specialistic nature. But most of all, these are skills you acquire. You learn putting things that you learned at school into practice – to a bigger or lesser extent of coincidence with what your vocational training prepared you for – and that is exactly what getting the so-called experience is all about. At a certain point of your professional development you are then reaching a stabilization stadium, when the acquired skills become more or less automatic. There are then two scenarios possible: either you are enjoying this relatively stable and quiet period and then gradually heading to seniority, or you are eventually feeling the lack of growth and development and become unhappy and ‘bored out’. I’d like to avoid generalizing too much, as this is very individual to everyone, but just sketching a picture to get the idea.

 

This feeling of lack of development and professional growth is exactly the opposite of what you feel when learning new things. At least this definitely applies to me. And learning new things in our digital era has never been easier and more accessible. Given you are a self-motivated, so-called autotelic individual and are capable of motivating yourself to learn something new even if it’s not particularly necessary, you will be rewarded if you have a look at the limitless source of information and knowledge that Internet has become.

Anyway, if you are as knowledge-savvy as me, you’ll be elated to find out how many wonderful sources there are on the web to learn new stuff. You should also be critical of the quality, of course, but if we are talking about the content made accessible to the general public under open licenses by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford or Berkeley, then we are talking high-end educational materials here. Welcome to the age of MOOCs, massive open online courses, aimed at large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web, as they are hotter than hot!

When I learned about open courseware like a year ago, I was ecstatic. Don’t I have to pay to enroll in one of those (under)graduate courses by MIT that I can just follow online? I mean I even wasn’t allowed to follow a minor in Microeconomics during my communication studies bachelor, as I had to be a member of the economics faculty for that. What a shame, which especially felt stupid, as I had already purchased an expensive textbook before I found out! But now I’m following the Microeconomics classes by the most celebrated professors of a leading university in the States that I would otherwise hardly have access to just a couple of years back! And what’s more – lucky me – they happen to recommend that same textbook to the course J. I’m at topic 3 of unit 1 after just 2 weeks and counting… Gee, it’s a lot of homework reading sometimes, but I’m determined to finish by the end of November.

As far as the open courseware is concerned, it seems to be a topic of hot discussions in the world of education. And as education is something near and dear to me because of my degree in ELT, I did a little research into the open courseware market. The open educational resources come in all possible forms, varying in subjects offered, the degree of interaction and feedback (e.g. peer-review or group collaboration), fixed/free starting course dates, grading and possibilities of certification. They all are forms of e-learning, or education using new technologies, primarily complex software platforms, including access to videos of the lectures, handouts, (interactive) group assignment, exams etc. Udacity (a for-profit MOOC with the roots at Stanford university), Coursera (offering a range of university course with fixed starting dates), MITOpenCourseWare (with over 2080 courses available online), edX (a non-profit cooperation of MIT and Harvard with a goal to conduct research into learning), iTunesU (perfectly compatible with the Apple’s ITunes Store and other Apple’s products) are just a few most popular to name here. There are also MOOCs in other language than English and the number of countries and educational establishments joining in is constantly growing.

As of 2012, there is talk of a hype around the growing popularity of MOOCs. Time magazine even stated that free MOOCs open the door to the 'Ivy League for the Masses’, which cannot but make universities worry. Moreover, the university’s are also worried about tuitions. What if this great initiative is going to work against them with the student numbers decreasing? At the moment the tendency is to charge for the actual certification, but the discussion is still going on as to the financial part of the matter, with most of the free educational resources currently financed with donations.

So no matter what your motivation is: becoming more effective in the work you do (and maybe even getting paid more eventually), compensating for a lack of degree or simply because learning new things is fun, with a little perseverance, discipline combined with some smart time management – especially if done next to a (fulltime) job – knowledge of greatest quality is out there, easily accessible, interactive and free, just reach out and you’ll get it. Also hop on now and be on time before the providers of this great knowledge come up with some smart idea to still charge you for the resources provided.

Do you have experience with learning after graduation or leaning next to a job? Do tell us about it! And have a lot of fun learning!

How to Stay Focused in Summer

Now that temperatures are rising far above what is considered to be a typical Dutch summer and 80% of your colleagues are on vacation, you might find yourself having difficulty to concentrate on whatever it is you are doing. Also wondering what you can put on to work so that it is more or less decent, but that you still don’t die of sweatiness and heat, you probably have few other things on your mind than the sun, the beach and the good life. At least that is what applies to me, I should confess.

This quiet summertime when people are mostly busy with a good deal of other things rather than their direct responsibilities is referred to in Dutch with a weird enough term “cucumber time”. The other day I heard on the radio where this seemingly strange name is coming from: evidently, in the past, the only thing papers would write about, around July – early August, when there’s no other news to tell, would be the cucumber price fluctuations. Very important to know, don’t you think? So, there’s hardly any news, not much is happening, but also less busy highways and virtually no traffic jams – that’s what’s the summertime is about for a working person like me who has enjoyed a vacation at the beginning of summer, which already feels like ages back.

The Pismo Beach

Does it have any sense to, career-wise, do anything at this very still time of the year? If you are job-hunting, you might just think that waiting till it’s September again to go on looking for that one dream job of yours could be a good idea, but bear this in mind if you want to stand out of the crowd: according to some recruiters, applying for jobs can actually be strategic in summer. If a company misses workforce as long as most employees are on vacation, they might be in very bad trouble. Just make sure to be there with your application to help them out – chances are, they’ll make a decision to hire you faster, than, say, in September. Seems to make sense: a couple of people I know who have been looking for a job for quite a while, have finally been hired as of late.

And if you do have a job, but feel discouraged by the half-empty office or by great sunny days, here are a couple of tips for you to stay focused I came across on intermediair.nl and find helpful:

·       Do everything with a goal: no one gets much motivation of meaningless activities. Or help yourself getting a better focus, once you let it slip aside for a while: ask yourself something like “why was I doing it again”?

 ·       Feel responsible for your own results: if you are responsible, you are in control, which is a powerfully motivating feeling

·       Don’t try to do things perfectly, just do it, starting with something really small

·       Surround yourself with motivated people – enthusiasm is known to be contagious

·       Eat healthy, sleep enough and watch your energy levels

And from time to time just allow yourself to enjoy, without feeling guilty or thinking that you should be doing something useful – after all, such a summer has not happened to the Dutch for the last 6 or 7 years, chances are it won’t happen soon again that for more that 2 weeks in a row the word combination ‘tropical temperatures’ has occurred so frequently in weather forecasts.

Do you have any own secret ways to stay focused? Let me know! And in the meantime - happy summer!