how ‘s your relationship with yourself? Is it tense, or cool?

     

       Today I brought to you one of the finest issues launched recently concerning  self-help and self-improvement area, which is « self-compassion », before we get into it, I  have got a few questions for you:  are you hard or easy on yourself ? how you treat yourself  every time something in your life doesn’t go as you want it to ? are you too judgmental about your own inadequacies and faults ? do you treat yourself the way you treat the people you love? why, why not ?

     After having responding to those questions above, at least now you do have an idea about whether you enjoy a high level of self-compassion or you just don’t have any of it. Having compassion for one’s self can be the same as having compassion for others ( friends, family).  Yet in order for you to have compassion for others you must be aware of their sufferings, for instance a friend of yours, it just  happened to lose his/her own job, if you ignored the fact he/she is jobless you won’t  be able to feel compassion for how difficult  his/her  experience is. What truly happens is that you get deeply touched by others’ suffering and then your heart starts responding  in a magical way, you show caring ,warm compassionate feelings, and pity, instead of being harsh or critical towards people. Once you reached this state it means that you have acknowledged the fact that imperfection and failure are apart of the human life.

    Now back to our main concern  “Self-compassion”, it is about treating yourself the way you treat the ones you love,and stop criticizing and rebuking yourself , whenever you feel stuck , or just having a difficult experience. Self-compassion helps you to see that our imperfections, failure, and suffering are the accompaniment of life, by accepting this as a fact and as a human condition shared by all of us, then you will reach the point where you start to embrace your humanness. All these lead to increasing the level of your self-compassion.

   Bear in mind that Self-compassionate people are well aware of the fact that frustration,failure, frictions, and troubles are inevitable so they decided to be more gentle with themselves instead of whipping themselves with self-criticisms.

Read More

Talent versus Hard work

Some argue that to be talented is good enough while others claim that hard work and determination is the key to achieve success. Talent is an innate capacity that needs to develop through practice. Therefore to be talented doesn’t mean to sit all day long on the couch waiting for better results to present themselves that will not happen, in this case talent is useless. So as to avoid wasting your talents you need motivation and here where “Hard work” takes place, one needs to put his/her own talent into practice for instance in order for a writer or a singer to shine in his/her own domain and make a name for himself/herself, he/she needs to work harder and practice more and more, though the fact that he/she is that talented.

 As you can see that talent without hard work is a waste, that is to say that both talent and hard work count, thus, they must go hand in hand.

And since I am a deep thinker and always in my mind; I brought to you this delicate issue to engage you with me to help make your minds work as well, so what do you think counts more “ Talent” or “Hard work” ?

To help get the picture clearer for you, here is a great example of our times, the best

soccer player of the 21^th century Cristiano Ronaldo; I have watched a documentary about him in which he stated that all the success he achieved today was a result of ton of efforts, struggle, hard work and determination, and it has nothing to do with talent. Accordingly success will not come out of nothing, or by saying I am talented I have not to spend much time preparing I can handle it easily, as an illustration to this, those smart genius students who see their classmates study for 12 hours to get a nice mark while they have to study only for two hours and it is done, in the long run, this will not lead you anywhere, you might get worse by not working on your talent, thus it is necessary to devote a lot of time and hard work to make it happen. And going back again to soccer field so many talented players missed the chance to enter the history and to be recognized by not putting their talents into practice, and hard work.

Hence the magical formula that truly works is when you put your talent and the hard work together.

Below I will site some steps that you may need to follow in order to combine between your talent and hard work:

    ü Find out what your talent is: we all know that every human-being got something unique so you may find yourself having pleasure doing some activities over others. Some prefer art others choose sport and the list goes on.. Your main goal in this step is to find what you are good at, bear in mind that it is never too late, seek and you will find.

  ü Choose your path :  once your know what your talent is now it is the time to decided what     are you going to do with it and what your ultimate goal is ?

    ü Make progress: enough thinking and orchestrating it is the time to make progress, one move each day with having a clear vision of the goal you are aiming for will lead to where you destined to be.

     ü And finally stick to hard work: never let disappointment and fear creep into your heart and mind, keep working harder no matter what takes, at the end you will see the light, blessings and opportunities.

Read More

Unemployment Stress and Ways to handle it

Nowadays, being unemployed (jobless) is one of the most difficult problems , that the educated segment  of the society suffers most from, mainly after having getting their college graduation and diplomas.  Therefore being aware of how to cope with it becomes a necessity.  The motive behind writing this humble article is to shed light on some of the outcomes of being unemployed or without a job.  The good news is that I am not going only to list those consequences but also try to provide you with some substitutions that would help you to get out the most out of being unemployed. It is very crucial to say that we must avoid to look at this experience as a source of evil and troubles, on the contrary it can be a great chance to re-evaluate , map-out , and ask ourselves what we truly want out of life. Therefore I think by developing this kind of thinking we would be able to benefit the most from this period of recession. Now some of the problems that escort being unemployed :

• Fall prey for negativity and negative thinking.

• Second being depressed, stressed and sad.

• Third, lack of organization and lack of control of one’s lif.

Remember that when one door closes another opens, so I am inviting my readers and everyone who is reading this right now, to stay optimistic about the future, and bear in mind that everything we go through now is preparing us for what we asked for. Being optimistic helps to look at the bright sides of any event and situation, and always hope for the best to come. Here are some few tips that truly worked with me:

• Set for yourself goals that are achievable, and try to develop a plan in which you list the steps that you are going to follow to reach them: It is a good thing to have goals, they give us the sense of direction and focus, yet the problem is that a lot of people don’t act on their goals and in here the goals turn to be as fantasies, “Goals are something you are acting on. Dreams are something you are just thinking about “, so to sum up, acting on your goals is of immense importance

• Try to learn new skills for instance, computing, looking for free courses on-line, and reading books: Learning new stuff can be very useful; it broadens your knowledge and keeps you up-to date.

• Pay more attention to your health and this can be through  practicing sport regularly, eating healthy food , and sleeping well :  excersing helps to release “Endorphins“ and “Serotonin“ which make you feel good about yourself and even more happy, the research show that people who exercise three times per week suffer less from anxiety and stress.  In addition the very fact of eating clean and healthy food improves your mental health, for instance when you don’t eat well you feel a bit dizzy, tired and your head starts to hurt. So eat well and clean. As a conclusion is very important to pay attention to all these components because they are interrelated, one depends on the other.

Note: This modest contribution was inspired by a personal experience that of mine, I myself suffered at the very beginning.  Actually I have passed through three main phases: 1-initial shock, 2-stressed over things that are out of my control, And finally 3- adjustment in other words, I started to reconcile and deal with the situation in a positive manner, instead of focusing on the dark sides I have decided to look for the bright sides and always expecting the best!

Read More