Tag: #change

How we can live life more emotionally

Emotional reactions aren’t exactly hard to find. Online, the world can feel very polarised, so it can be a challenge to keep a cool head when discussing divisive topics – be that climate, diversity, war or anything else.

For many of us, we’ve been taught the value of avoiding emotional reactions. It’s important for us to be able to listen to others without reacting straight away. Yet whilst we are better off not reacting to the first emotion that we have, I also feel we have gone too far the other way.

We have inadvertendly idealised the idea of being cool, calm and collected over the ability to express genuine feelings.

Don’t cry for me Argentina – trip reflections

I’m on my last leg of Argentina. In fact, I’m currently writing this article thousands of miles in the sky, on my way back to Europe. This week I went to Bariloche, Patagonia. I returned to Buenos Aires for one night before returning back to Brussels (with an exotic layover in Frankfurt).

My trip to Argentina has been weird. It had a mix of solo travel, spending time with some family (brothers/cousins) and also travelling with extended/new friends.

What has also been travelling with me is a consistent cough, which has been a particular challenge on certain days too.

We can travel away from everything except ourselves

This article marks two years of writing articles each week consecutively. The last time I missed a week was in January 2022. And it just so happens that I’m writing this one from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I’ve been posting pretty frequently on social media around the different things I’ve been seeing. I didn’t really have a set intention to do so, but I just felt like getting the thoughts out of my head and into the world.
Throughout my posts, I wanted to ensure that I kept a level of grounded realism about travelling. We’ve all seen the exotic lifestyles being portrayed on social media that are far from reality. Instead, I wanted to talk about how I genuinely experienced the parts of my trip.

The untold truth about travelling is that whilst it can be great, amazing, breathtaking, it is still living life. There are exciting moments, and there are boring moments.

The subtle art of getting on with life

Life doesn’t stop. Even if we want it to.

I’ve been slowly reawakening to life after the new year. Honestly, it’s felt lethargic and difficult.

Alas, life does not wait for us to feel in tip top condition. For those of us in the EU bubble, the return to work has felt more intense than ever. We’ve hit ‘la rentrée’. People are back in town. Social activities have restarted. Emails are flying around in abundance. The break is officially over.

This week has been a lesson in practice of getting on with my life. I still feel under a cloud of existential questioning. But I realise that it’s better I go out and do things rather than hiding away from them.

Managing the existential questioning after the holiday period

The last two weeks have been a lethargic period for many people. For me, I’m noticing that I’m probably more frazzled than I was before this ‘rest period’ started.

It is often the period of rest that allows issues to surface. When we are too busy, we don’t give space for the bigger questions in life to arise. For me, this has been a new layer of existential questioning of who I am.

There is no escaping the fear and confusion. It is part of the process. Running away from it does not make it go away, it just merely prolongs the experience.

What does 2024 hold in store?

One of the great things about writing articles weekly is that it’s pretty easy to go back to them and see how life panned out in 2023.

These last few days I’ve been resharing some of the most meaningful articles that I’ve written this year. It’s a good way of being able to reconnect with the ebbs and flows of the last 364 days.

So in my 52nd and final article of 2023, let’s first look back to help me look forward.

What did I even do in 2023?

Before logging off work, I wrote a recap email of all the things our team had achieved this year.

It was meant to be a short thank you email with a summary. But I realised that this would not really be doing the task justice. So instead, I spent some time properly trawling through our achievements.

I’m not sure I totally did it justice, but I’m glad I wrote it out rather than just saying ‘we wrote 3 reports and did 5 events this year’.

We can really downplay the accumulative effect of what we have achieved. So I thought I would also do a similar exercise for myself, blending in the personal and the professional.

Why we don’t need to be constantly improving ourselves

We’re nine days from Christmas, and I’m feeling pretty exhausted. Usually, I would start feeling reminiscent about what I had achieved around this time of year. But right now, I honestly don’t really feel like it. It just doesn’t seem very fun to reflect right now. I’ve had an ample share of emotional intensity for the last few months, so adding more doesn’t feel like a fun thing to do

An invitation to stop using time-saving hacks

Last weekend I volunteered to help make food at an event. It was a pretty basic task. I had to restock the drinks bottles on the shelf, refill the snack bowls and make some pizzas in the oven.
I was surprised to find it was the most relaxed I’ve felt when making food in about a year. The basic task of cutting up pizza slices was bringing me more joy than similar tasks usually do.
The big difference was that I was taking my time.

The power of understanding our productivity fluctuations

In the past four weeks I’ve been doing more public speaking than I’ve done in the last six months

On Wednesday I gave the final push to a paper we’re launching at COP on the social aspects of circular economy. In practice, this meant mass reviewing 1000 revisions on track changes and comments to a semblance of a clean document.

Unsurprisingly by Thursday I was knackered. I remarked to one of my colleagues that this was one of the least productive days that I’ve had in months.
When I gave myself the grace to realise how much I had been pushing myself over the last two weeks, I could see that this was a natural cycle of energetic flow.