Tag: Young Adults

Some rules of life are never written down anywhere, and they will carry you past almost any obstacle you meet. It makes little difference where the obstacle sits. It may block a career, a relationship, a social life or a private one.

Apply these principles and the thing in the way stops being the end of the road.

Treat every obstacle as a challenge

Reclassify the thing. Call it a challenge rather than a problem, and it becomes far easier to get past.

The difference lies in what you expect of it. An obstacle understood as a threat will be avoided. An obstacle understood as a contest is something you intend to win.

Go to a specific counsellor

Whatever has gone wrong, in a relationship or at work, somebody handles that exact thing for a living. They can be approached.

A career blocked calls for a career counsellor. What you gain is an expert opinion formed outside your own head, and objectivity of that kind is frequently what produces the solution.

Change your approach and your way of thinking

Sometimes nothing is wrong with the obstacle at all. The flaw is in the approach being taken to it.

Examine the situation properly, and ask whether anything in your own conduct or your own actions could be done differently to useful effect.

That is frequently the whole of the matter. The obstacle never moved. The approach did.

Being yourself has a plain enough definition. What you say is what is true for you. The ideas and the thoughts you order your days around are your own. Something then becomes visible in you from the inside out, and other people read it as certainty.

Why pretending costs so much

Anyone in the world who is not doing this is hunting for that same assurance about who they are.

The reason is not mysterious. Stop being you, and the thing you have started attempting is to be something you are not.

Sustaining that has a price, and the price is charged internally. Stress arrives. So does confusion. So does a competitiveness that has nowhere to go, because the person being forced into existence is not you.

Where the habit was learned

Look at the crowd of people around you who have no idea who they are, and the origin of the habit becomes visible.

Nobody sat us down and taught it. As children we absorbed it: that in this society attention has to be competed for, and so does affection, and so does respect. Above all we absorbed two instructions: that a person must become somebody, and that a person must fit in.

Every one of those lessons carries a person away from what they already were.

The part of you that does not change

How you appear from outside will shift across the years. That is ordinary, and no cause for concern.

What sits underneath does not shift. There is a child in there still, unspoiled, fresh, playful, wide awake. At that depth, a person is not a version of life. They are life.

People who have stopped performing are simply what is true about them at that moment. They talk out of that inner place, and nothing about them needs managing.

It gives other people permission

Here is the effect that is easy to miss. Dropping the performance does something to the people around you, because it frees them to drop theirs.

Allowing another person to be who they are, and treating that as their right, is precisely what opens the same room for you. The two movements are one movement.

And anyone who recognises the genuine article in you will respect you for it, for the simple reason that it is what they are looking for themselves.

Are the shelves at home overflowing with bits and pieces? Is it a struggle to turn up a matching pair of shoes, or two earrings, let alone one hairpin?

Here are three ways to get a house better organised, and the pleasing thing about all of them is that they repurpose something you already have.

Binder clips in the freezer

Take a handful of binder clips and clip your bags onto the freezer shelves.

It is a little fiddly at first, keeping the bag sealed while you fix it to the rung, and practice sorts that out. What you get back is time and space, and a freezer that looks considerably more organised than it did.

A magazine rack for pot lids

Once the pans themselves have a home, the lids still need one, and lids are what turn a tidy cupboard back into a jumble.

The walls inside a cupboard are the right spot and they are almost always going unused. You can buy a dedicated lid holder. Or you can save the money and give an old magazine rack a second life doing exactly the same job.

A cutlery organiser for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes are among the most germ-laden things in a house, which is not what most people expect of an object they put in their mouth twice a day.

What they need above all is to dry out properly between uses, and a crowded pot does not allow it. Take an unused cutlery organiser and give every brush its own compartment. Each one gets air on all sides, and nothing touches anything else.

Three small changes, no purchases, and a house that is easier to live in by the weekend.

Are you financially prepared to turn thirty? A checklist tells you whether your finances are heading the right way, which is different from knowing whether this month went well.

Tracking your progress against the same list each year makes it much easier to see what you have completed and what is still waiting.

The career check

Start here, because this is where the money comes from.

Ask yourself the plain questions. Do you enjoy what you do? Is your pay rising at a decent pace? Then review your skills honestly and work out whether you have been keeping up or quietly falling behind.

Your career supplies a major portion of your income, and for most people all of it. Knowing where you stand in it lets you estimate the level of comfort you can expect when you eventually put your feet up.

Medical expenses

What is the picture with yours? How much are you actually spending on your health, and do you hold health insurance?

Health costs are among the largest surprises anyone gets hit with. They arrive without notice and they arrive large. Being prepared for them is a different activity from hoping they do not come.

The emergency fund

The most important question on the list is whether you are ready for an expense you did not plan for.

Have you got enough set aside to cover three to six months of expenses? That is the benchmark. An emergency fund is what rescues you when money is needed in a hurry, and having one changes an emergency into an inconvenience.

Long-term investments

Saving protects you. Investing is what builds wealth, and they are not the same job.

The piece points at mutual funds and describes them as high-return options. Treat that description carefully: returns vary, are not guaranteed, and past performance settles nothing. The sounder half of the advice is the balance it recommends, between equity investments on one side and traditional schemes such as fixed deposits and recurring deposits on the other.

Saving regularly and early in a career is what produces a sufficient amount in the retirement fund by the time the golden years arrive.

As ever, none of this is advice about your particular situation. A checklist tells you which questions to ask. Someone who knows your circumstances answers them.

A hero is not born. A hero is self-made, and that distinction is the whole of the subject.

The qualities below are not exotic. Every one of us possesses some measure of all of them. What sets the hero apart from the rest of us is not having virtues nobody else has. It is being the fullest embodiment of the ones everybody has.

Courage

The first quality and the foremost. A hero overcomes his fears and meets a challenge directly rather than circling it.

The claim made here is strong: that not even the faintest trace of fear is left lingering in a hero’s heart. Whether you accept it fully or not, the direction is right. Courage is not the absence of the feeling, it is the refusal to let the feeling decide.

Sacrifice

This one stands apart from the other virtues, and it is what makes a person’s deeds noble rather than merely effective.

A hero is willing to put aside their preferences and their personal comfort at the moment those things become an obstacle to a higher cause or to the welfare of other people. Note the condition. Not always, and not for display. Whenever it becomes necessary.

Determination

For a hero the word impossible always breaks apart to read: I am possible.

What follows from that is an unflinching determination, and a belief in one’s own ability without a whiff of doubt about it.

Compassion

A true hero is empathetic, showing considerable tenderness towards anyone who is ailing or in distress.

The mechanism is worth naming. Compassion here means setting aside the thoughts that are oriented towards yourself, and taking up an attitude that serves others instead. It is an act of attention before it is a feeling.

Honesty

In everything a hero undertakes, honesty is the base the rest is built on.

It earns the respect of other people, and respect is what allows a person to lead followers towards the goal rather than merely instruct them. Courage without honesty produces something else entirely, and nobody follows it for long.

Without noticing, we let toxic people shape our thoughts, our behaviour and how we feel. Here is how to keep some distance from that.

Guard your time

A negative person can monopolise your time even while they are nowhere near you, which is the part people miss.

It is entirely possible to lose two hours to dread ahead of a meeting that lasts one. That is three hours gone to a person who was present for one of them. Do not let them steal time that way.

Choose your attitude

Time spent with negative people is the quickest route there is to ruining a decent mood. A pessimistic outlook and a gloomy manner are catching; they lower motivation and change how you feel by the end of the afternoon.

But letting someone else dictate your emotional state hands them far more power than they should have. That is a decision, even when it does not feel like one.

Behave productively

Negative people bring out the worst in us when we are careless about it. Certain pessimists genuinely seem able to raise a person’s blood pressure, for reasons nobody can quite name.

The counter is to choose your conduct rather than react. Behave productively and the encounter costs you less.

Think wisely

Think clearly and make sensible decisions, and do not let your own negativity spoil your happiness. Take what is positive wholeheartedly and get on with your life.

Keep a positive view

Do not let your opinion of a person curdle because of one bad situation.

Hold a fair view of the person and of the circumstances, and do not leap to a conclusion about either. Most of what looks like someone’s character is a snapshot of their worst week.

Rather than trying to control the world and dodge every failure, you could take a risk and stretch past the edge of what is comfortable.

Does life feel like an endless run of struggle and stress? The cause may sit with your confidence, meaning your belief in your own ability to produce a good outcome when things get difficult.

What low confidence actually looks like

Not timidity. Most of it looks like effort.

We are fine while things go well and struggle to stay motivated the moment they harden. We turn severe on ourselves the moment we slip. We overwork and over-prepare, trying to stay ahead of a failure we imagine waiting just round the corner, and we become anxious and unwilling to risk anything.

And when success does arrive we do not let ourselves feel it. The joy of having accomplished something gets waved through without being enjoyed.

The three parts of the change

Being kind and caring towards yourself instead of harshly self-critical.

Framing your own imperfection as part of the shared human experience rather than as private evidence against you.

Seeing things clearly, which means neither ignoring a problem nor inflating it.

This is habit change, so it wants patience, attention and effort rather than a decision. The return is measurable: people who meet themselves with compassion are markedly less prone to depression and anxiety, and they carry more confidence in their own ability to succeed.

Notice how you speak to yourself

Particularly at the moment you have slipped up in your own eyes. Becoming aware of the existing pattern is the first step and most people want to skip it and get straight to fixing things. Do not skip it.

Gently practise a different response

It will feel faintly ridiculous at first, and the more entrenched the critical voice is, the sillier it feels. Persist anyway. Even small changes make a surprising difference to how you feel and to what you turn out to be capable of.

Borrow a kinder voice

When you are stuck in a judgemental pattern it is very hard to shift it in the moment. So let somebody else hold that voice for a while. Spend time with a person who actually embodies kindness, compassion and self-acceptance, and let the tone rub off.

Then practise, and practise

Change comes from consistent effort over time and not from one large attempt. Stay with it and it will make all the difference over a long stretch.

That is the path to a confidence that does not depend on how the week went. Do the work, stay attentive, and build a new way of relating to yourself.

However tough a person is, emotion remains a powerful part of a life, and there are moments where what you feel simply swamps you.

Start with what this is not. Learning to control your emotions does not mean learning to suppress them. It is closer to the opposite. Once you accept that you, like everybody else, react to particular inputs with particular feelings, you give yourself the chance not to let those feelings run your thoughts and your actions.

There is generally nothing wrong with expressing what you feel. We are wired for it. But anger, anxiety and fear are the three that need handling, and the question underneath is simple. Are you running your emotions, or are they running you?

You are in charge of your thoughts

Do not accept the idea that your own thinking is beyond your say.

Emotions certainly influence thoughts. What gets forgotten is that it runs both ways, and thought can be used to guide feeling, either strengthening it or working against it. The two are closely linked and they are not the same thing.

Try to look at the situation objectively. If you cannot, put it to a friend you trust, someone who can see it with less bias than you currently can and help you sort out what you actually think.

You are in charge of what you do

Even when the feeling stays stubbornly negative, what you do about it is still open.

Acting on a feeling, or declining to, is within your gift. Take a step back and look at the options instead of moving on instinct.

Be clear about what this buys you. Choosing the next action well will not make the feeling disappear. It reduces how much power the feeling has over you, which is a different and more achievable thing.

You can only control yourself

Run through the difficult emotions and the same thread shows up in all of them, which is control.

We are angry because we cannot make other people do what we want. We worry because tomorrow is not ours to arrange. We grieve because we lost someone or something through circumstances that were never in our hands. We are afraid because something is threatening us that we cannot govern.

Once you see that almost the only thing available to you is yourself, letting go of the rest becomes easier. Not easy. Easier.

Which leaves one place to put your attention, and it is enough. Not the event. How you respond to it.

A transaction processing system, usually shortened to TPS, is a kind of information processing system. Its job is to handle all the transactions moving into and out of a business.

The defining feature is that it takes them one at a time, in turn.

The cash machine

An ATM is the example everyone has used. It serves one person at a time, completes what that person came to do, and then moves to the next.

One thing is worth clearing up about the word transaction. In this context it does not only mean something financial. A request for information counts as a transaction too. The system is not defined by money changing hands, it is defined by handling one request through to completion.

The other way of doing it

The direct contrast is a batch processing system, which collects many transactions and processes them together as a batch.

Neither is simply better. They answer different questions. A batch system is efficient when a large number of similar items have to be dealt with and nobody is standing there waiting. A transaction system is what you want when somebody is standing there waiting.

An analogy from a download

Think of a torrent file attached to a folder of files. You cannot open any one file until the whole folder has finished downloading. Everything is held until everything is ready.

Transaction processing behaves the other way round. Results arrive in real time, one completed item at a time, which is what makes it convenient and what keeps it from becoming confusing.

Why the distinction is worth carrying

Because you meet it constantly without naming it. Your card payment clears while you stand at the counter. Your payslip is produced overnight with everybody else’s.

One of those is a queue of one. The other is a pile dealt with at once. Knowing which kind you are dealing with explains most of what people find frustrating about waiting for a system to answer them.

Experts argue about whether superstitions have any business in a job search. Meanwhile job seekers across the world carry their charms, keep their rituals, and go on receiving offers.

Superstition is among the most contested subjects there is, and never more so than where careers are concerned. It sounds unbelievable, and these rituals have still been part of the story for people who landed the job. Here are the ones that recur.

A glass of water under the bed

Kept there the night before an interview. Those who study the habit connect it to the old and widespread belief in the power of water, and some hold that water carries positive energy which helps a person find work and arrive at success sooner.

Lucky clothes

The belief that a particular outfit brings a good outcome, and that another will bring a poor one.

This one is tied to the idea of personal energy, and it has an odd extension: that anyone who wore the garment before you may have charged it, favourably or otherwise.

Fasting for sixteen Mondays

Monday in Hinduism belongs to Lord Shiva, who is associated with wisdom. The practice of fasting for sixteen consecutive Mondays is widely kept, on the understanding that devotion paid to Shiva assists a person’s professional life.

Keeping silent

A great many job seekers say nothing at all about a possible offer until it has become a settled fact.

Of everything on this list, this is the one that looks most reasonable. Announcing a thing before it exists invites the retelling of it if it falls through, and there is nothing supernatural about preferring to avoid that.

What to actually do

Three pieces of advice come attached, and none of them requires believing in any of the above.

Support matters at every stage of a life, so gather the support of your friends and your family, and then start looking properly.

A strategy failing is not the same as you failing. Some failures are there to shape the person who goes through them.

And for the superstitious: if you have a charm and it seems to work, there is no reason to change your habits. A ritual that steadies you before you walk into a room has done something real, whatever the mechanism.