Tag: #wellbeing

The stick-or-twist of whether to celebrate a birthday

I turned 30 this week. And I wasn’t sure how much I should celebrate or not.
I turned 30 this week. And I wasn’t sure how much I should celebrate or not.

I have a somewhat difficult relationship with birthdays. I found it hard to celebrate the occasion over the years because I felt it came at an inconvenient time. It was just after the school holidays, or just as the university term had started and everyone went home. Nobody was really around to do much for it.

On reflection, I think I learnt to dread my birthday. It was a day where I heard a lot about what I should experience, and how it was meant to be such a great day. I found that generally any such expectations were not met. Looking back on it I found the whole ordeal rather painful emotionally for many years.

In my adult years, my newest line has been to reject the notion of birthdays as a concept. ‘What’s in a day anyway?’. It made it a lot easier to just not engage with the idea of it, rather than deal with the expectations that came with it.

There is some truth to the fact that a single day does not make us nor break us. Yet If i’m honest with myself it’s also been a self defense mechanism I built up. It’s become so instilled in me I hadn’t even realised I had created it.

I’ve been travelling a bunch in the lead up to my birthday. I had a few social engagements dotted around before and after, so it got to the point where planning felt inconvenient. In the end, I didn’t really do a whole lot. And whilst I think ‘regret’ is too strong a word, a few days later I feel I probably missed an opportunity to mark the moment more vividly.

The beauty of personal development is that every opportunity is a moment where we can learn deep things about ourselves. This experience fits in with my journey of the last few weeks, notably realising how emotionally sensitive I am as a person.

I am reopening my heart to the world. Honestly, it’s a pretty painful experience. I am letting down guards that have been up for so long I didn’t even realise they were there. And opening up means both reexperiencing things I had shut away, but also coming into a deeper state of vulnerability. I’m having to reevaluate things like my ‘who cares’ attitude towards birthdays. I’ve also noticed that the bitterness towards my own experiences has been souring how I show up for others in their celebrations too.

All is not lost, birthdays are a great opportunity to reflect no matter how much or little we actively celebrate them. I’ve heard someone describe them as our own personal new year, which I’m quite fond of as a concept.

This last year has been a crazy journey for me. I’ve had many people talk about how much I have changed and evolved. I’ve had achievements like writing my book. But more profoundly, friends around me talk about the way I have shown up for them in a deeper, more powerful and loving way.

Life is opening up in ways that I didn’t think possible. I feel my 30s are going to be more fun and wild than my 20s, which is an exciting feeling. I am clearer in who I am choosing to be.

I’m on the path to self betterment and creating the life I want to live.
I have a somewhat difficult relationship with birthdays. I found it hard to celebrate the occasion over the years because I felt it came at an inconvenient time.

On reflection, I think I learnt to dread my birthday. It was a day where I heard a lot about what I should experience, and how it was meant to be such a great day. I found that generally any such expectations were not met. Looking back on it I found the whole ordeal rather painful emotionally for many years.

The ultimate freedom of seeing life as a game

This week, I took it relatively easy.
Well, that’s how I felt anyway, the reality was that I actually did rather a lot. It was the first time in a long time I’ve been into the office five days in a week (my own choice!). I also had evening activities on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

So why do I feel like this week was relatively relaxed?

Well it is relative. Essentially, it felt like tasks took far less effort this week than what they did last week.

The importance of simplicity in our messaging

I’ve worked in technical fields throughout my career, using words that most people would simply not understand. A key skill has been to make these things understandable and relatable for anyone.

I could easily bamboozle the people around me through specialist language, acronyms and obscure terminology. But learning to explain things to people in simple, short sentences has greatly enhanced my ability to get people to actually care about the stuff I’m talking about. Unfortunately, many people are not doing this very basic step, even though it is available to all of us.

Our language creates how we experience the world

This week, I’ve been in several conversations about the massive power language has in the way we live our life.
The language we use is the way we create our reality. For example, if we say that the meeting we’re going to have this afternoon is going to be ‘tedious’ or ‘boring’, we are already creating this to be how we are going to experience it. I’ve been far more mindful in the way I have been prejudging situations. Holding off on these labels has meant I show up in situations far more open. This in of itself is a massive lesson.
But the power of language goes even deeper. The way we describe events can cause emotional reactions which frame our wider worldview

We can enjoy each day – even when we are sick

I’ve been laid low by illness. What I thought was a cough was actually a throat infection. And whilst it’s nothing serious, it still took me out of action for the whole of this week.

This week’s article was prompted by a short conversation I had with someone. They told me that taking time to be sick made them feel bad because they felt unproductive. It made them feel like they are doing nothing.

This is a feeling that many of us have experienced in our lives. We don’t want to let the team down, and feel anxious at the idea of not doing something. When society instills in us the idea that we have to constantly be active, the idea of stopping feels like a bad thing.

But I’ve come to enjoy my sick days much more than I used to. Rather than sit still pondering the universe until I go crazy, I take this as a moment for me to slow my movements and withdraw into myself.

An invitation to try less hard in your life

This is the first weekend I’ve spent at home in Brussels in over a month.

The last four weekends I’ve been away, on a mix of travels through India and successive trips to the UK.

And you know what? I’m tired. Not because of any overt travel fatigue, but because I’ve felt like life has been a consistent set of new hurdles.
The irony is that the only person who fundamentally has been placing these hurdles is myself.

Having now got through a lot of courses and personal adventures, I’m feeling quite worn out. I’m really glad I did these things, but I’m also conscious at how hard I have been pushing myself. Do I really need to live life as if I don’t have time to breath?

How to be truly consistent in your life

Early in my career, I worried about being a ‘streaky’ character. I would often ask myself – can I really be consistent over longer periods of time in the workplace? After all, I had done several internships of shorter timeframes ranging from 2 to 6 months.
In fact, this article is actually a particular achievement for me. It marks a year since I last missed writing an article for a week in this newsletter. In other words, I’m on a 53 week streak. It’s crazy to think that I’ve managed to keep up this level of consistency for such a long time.
The consistency worked because it worked for me. It is a personal thing after all. But equally, the way that I am being has shifted to naturally be more consistent.
The way I see and act in the world is very different to when I first started publishing articles.

Our anxiety is stopping us from making positive change

Through my professional and personal life, I’ve come across many extraordinary, driven individuals who want to make a positive impact in the world.
Unfortunately, what I also see is a lot of stress, anxiety and overwhelm. There is an increase in the amount of burnout which is negatively affecting people’s personal sense of wellbeing. This is sad in of itself – everyone deserves to live a happy, fulfilling life.
But also, when we are stressed or burnt out, we are also becoming far less effective in making the change we want to see in the world. This means the positive change is severely limited.
But the great news is that we can change our outlook. One of the big revelations for me was recognising that the barrier to my own performance was the way I treated myself.

I thought 2022 would be less remarkable than 2020-21. I was wrong.

I’ve found this holiday period a good moment to slow down and reflect on the year – and what better day to do a reflective article than on 31 December?
I’ve firstly noticed how much residual fatigue I’ve been building up, particularly in the last few months. I got hit by an illness for the first two weeks of December, and since then I’ve felt myself battling to return to my previous routines of productivity. Of course, this isn’t a real battle, instead it’s one being waged within my mind.
Looking further back through 2022, I thought this year would be a period of stability and foundation-level building. After 2020 and 2021, years which felt like a period of survival (and physical upheaval for me moving to Belgium) I was hoping for something a little more solid but a bit less remarkable.
Spoiler alert – 2022 felt very different to what I thought it would – it certainly was more remarkable than I expected.

Welcoming our unpleasant feelings as friends

In the quest for the nice feelings, we implicitly learn that the unpleasant feelings are bad. So we look to avoid the pain and sadness, after all, why feel those feelings when we can feel happy?
Many of us spend a lot of time avoiding things that make us uncomfortable, or look to distract ourselves when we are sad. Even when we are finally forced to face these feelings, we bare through it with gritted teeth.

I have been reflecting on this theme as I have battled through a biting cough and severe sore throat over the last few days. In the past, this would be the cue for me to be frustrated at my body, and look at how inconvenient this all was.
But this time, I took time to appreciate what my body was telling me. It was time for me to slow down and heal