Top 3 Ways to Conquer Your Fears & Worries

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90 percent of us in the world are diagnosed with what I call "fearonitis" and "hyperworrydosis". And although we have spent much of our lives knowing that we are not the only ones vying with this everyday, we still fall most vulnerable-- on wee hours-- when we're unaccompanied. 

It's a recurring kind of woe. It finds a way to catch us unguarded, when our positive self- image is in short supply. But there are antidotes.  

To begin with the battle, you have to first identify and avoid the factors that contribute to it. Otherwise it will always have a hatchway to jeopardize your life.

1. Take a break from social networks

Seriously, muster the willpower to leave your life on stream for some time. Your Facebook feed is jam-packed with press releases of friends who just got featured in a magazine, or had a two- week long vacation in Tuscany, or landed a job in a nation with a first world status. You may hit the thumbs up button for them but you know that there is still a trace of compare-and-despair trapped inside you. It makes you feel left behind and less appreciative of your own and other people's success. 

If you cannot let a day pass without logging in to your accounts, at least make a time for the non- virtual once or twice a month. Meet your high school friends. Human interaction remains the most important key to generate the right perspectives and evaluate the real situation. It allows you to size up and express things a social network could limit.

A day you spend in front of Facebook may be a day you miss the chance to try a new skill or plan out how to make your life better. 

2. Narrow your focus

You cannot control the way others want to live their lives.Whether you discredit them for their limitations or drown yourself in envy for their strengths, it'll never make you greater of a person. Doing this would rarely earn you millions but would mostly count up the nasty behavior in you. 

Focus on yourself. It's okay to feel a little uptight about the good things you see in other people. Just don't develop hate towards them. Instead, grow up where you are lacking. If you intend to improve on the way you dress up, search on how to properly pull an outfit together. If you want to improve your conversation skills, read some grammar and try out new vocabularies, or watch how great speakers do it. If you're forgetting a skill in your profession, spare a few minutes a day reviewing it.

A little something is still better than nothing.

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Know what your ultimate goal is and take some time to look for opportunities to develop yourself personally and professionally in the areas that can largely help you reach that goal. Never mind if you feel stagnant at work. Don't wait for others to give you the privilege to improve when you can do it for yourself. Attend training or seminars to update your skills. You may not be able to apply it directly and immediately to your job but it adds or refreshes your knowledge. Take baby steps to face your fears and worries. That's the only way to get rid of them.


3. Condition your mind

Our life can be driven by different factors depending on our current situation and beliefs. Often these factors are the ones that create the biggest fears and worries in our life. But these differences also tell us that we cannot view life according to other people's footsteps. For instance, we know that there's an impact when someone does or achieves great things at an early age. But that's his own pace-- according to his capacity and resources.  It's unfair if we also identify the criteria by which to measure our own success in life in conformity with his. Because as we say, we are different. Our capacity and resources will lead us to that success at our own bearing and time. But it doesn't mean we cannot become successful ourselves.

Condition your mind away from the tick tock. It's a huge robber of happiness and determination. Peter Mark Roget finished the famous thesaurus book at age 73. Andrea Bocelli didn't start singing the opera until the age of 34. Albert Einstein was mentally slow. He didn't speak till he was four and didn't read till seven. But he's one of the most famous scientists who won a Nobel prize. Walter Disney was fired for lack of imagination and was rejected 302 times (or so I read). But now he's the legend behind the most successful animation company in the world.

Get the whole picture. Someone else might be dreaming of the way that you are right now. Always find yourself moving forward.

You may hit the rock bottom at many points in your life, but the secret is to never fail to condition your mind to drift back up again and again. 

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wehearit.com

  

How to be Attractive in 9 Easy Steps

The word attractive will, first of all, depend on how you define things as attractive. If being fit and well- dressed is your example of attractive, then it is probably what it is. Hence, it is relative. 

Err, attractive doesn't always mean erotic. But it's something that we do to appeal not only to the other people but to ourselves as well. 

Below are simple and easy steps, which I sourced out from an infographic, on how to be attractive:

1. Smile

2. Smell nice or don't smell at all

3. Dress for style and respect, not attention

4. Know what's going on in the world and have an opinion about it

5. Speak kindly of yourself and those around you

6. Have three hobbies that do not involve a screen

7. Get an education or save up for one

8. Make time for children, elderly, and those who need a friend

9. Always say thank you and return favors

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Parenting Stint: 5 Sibling Rivalry Fix

Tots who are supported and praised when starting to learn their early childhood skills grow with autonomy and positive self-esteem. But teaching them a little less of autonomy and confidence, and more of appreciation and coöperation may also be as important.

Living in a house with two little nieces of almost the same age got me into episodes of tiny feuds. The 6-year-old miss would not usually put up with her soon-to-be 4-year-old sister.   The “She started it.” and “Why can’t she just use her own crayons?!” lines sometimes distract me from my reading. My hopeful attempts to make my own short vacations at home mostly end up into a bundle of disaster.

These siblings quibbling are not necessarily trivial since they begin at large in the formative years or the first 7 years of life. How my nieces learn to handle brannigan will influence the way they will handle disagreements when they become adults. The role of parents and guardians goes without saying.

As their tita (Aunt) I feel like having to apply what I learned from college, books, and parenting dialogues with the experts. My degree in Nursing has always been a help to a not-yet-mom like me.

Behavior Variations

Toddler and pre-school are the years when children first learn to have enough vocabularies to express their feelings. It is also the stage when they start to learn how responsibilities are shared in the home.

My 6-year-old niece’s familiar lines however prove that there are emotions and responsibilities she cannot fully understand. She is not absolved by the explanation, “Your sister is just a baby. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing”. She often thinks there are privileges and behaviors allowed to her sister that are not tolerated in her.

It is not at all easy since what you think as temperate solution to perils might result into behavior confusion.

See it in general

Approach both lightly and ask without provoking. Provoking promotes defensive reasons as do my nieces. Detecting what’s really going on might help both children; and help parents or guardians learn just how to deal with the kids individually.

Feelings, Oh, Oh, Oh feelings

Bottom-line is, feelings of jealousy occur in some way when there is more than one kid in the house. The key is to help them recognize their feelings by observing them and encouraging them when they do something favorable “I like the way you let your sister borrow your crayons” or “It’s good that you helped her fix her things”.

It’s always not advisable to use the word “bad” when pointing out that something wrong was done. It rather confuses them what they are actually feeling.

For very young children like my nieces, doing some prompting is a big help, “I can see that you feel sad that your sister doesn’t feel like sharing her toys with you now” or pointing specifically to the act, “I see that you took your sister’s drawing book without her permission” and asking follow-up questions like, “Why did you do it?”. Allowing so helps both parents and the kids see the bigger picture.

It’s true that when kids know their feelings are respected, they become more empathetic to others. The rule of the thumb is-- acknowledgement.

Help them communicate

Allowing the kids to express how they feel gives them the idea that their opinion matters. Using words like “she feels”, “she looks”, “you seem” “I think” and avoiding definitive phrase like “It’s bad” will let them distinguish bad behaviors of the person over the person herself.

Set up rules

Kids understand rules more than you think. Rules also help diminish conflicts and help them follow and stick to their responsibilities.

But one important thing to remember is to always be consistent with your rules. Sticking with TV schedules, taking turns, or providing them space will help instill in them discipline, patience, concern, and respect for privacy.

Play is key

Doing activities that foster coöperation like board games, or for Filipino families, bahay-bahayan will encourage coöperation and family bonding.

For more cooperative children games you may refer to Child Care Lounge and Family Pastimes. 

Unfit situations like sibling rivalry can be used as time to teach kids good lessons. How kids are taught will say a lot about who they will most likely become in the future. You might as well do them a favor. I am beginning to.






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3 (Short) Ways to Help Master Your Thoughts

There's one line in the novel turned movie, Eat, Pray, Love that clobbered me when I've heard it speak into my mind, "If you can't master your thoughts you will always be in trouble". It's as if I had no idea that line existed for years in books and in the persuasive mouth of famous speakers and Psychologists.

I believe most if not all of us are radically aware of this principle in life. But by the time we move out of our comfort zone and expand our relationships, stress beleaguers like compulsory.

However, it's not solely material thing or work strain that's responsible for our mental burn out but largely because of people. We relate to others even more than we do over our bed sheets. Thus, there are far more chances that our power over our thoughts gets shaken by the impact of these people in us. 

1. Personal Commercial

Have you ever heard of that before? Listening to motivational speech is by far one of the best ways to build and rebuild our self-assurance. It's seldom however that we get the chance or sometimes even the interest to spare a time for these speeches until we find them badly necessary. 

If the situation really calls for it and you need something to help you rise up from mental and self-esteem troubles, you can listen as fast to such a motivational speech by creating a personal commercial. You may formulate in your mind or write 3-5 lines that tell your strengths and goals. Recite them in front of a mirror or plainly narrate them into your mind like an introvert junior high would Winston Churchill. Or as the monk would Madonna, had it been the way to practice her vocation.

    2.   Your part...

Instead of thinking what the world can do for you, think of what you can do for the world. Taking your part in doing what can benefit the world will add up to your self-belief tank. No matter what you do, no matter where you go, if you won't realize that everything else is merely a response or reflex of what you make your mind believe, everybody you meet will just always become a nightmare. 

    3.  Manual

When a gadget say a tab or a DSLR gets defective, there's no better way or person to approach for some fixing than the one who made it. Or we review the manual. If we get caught up in a bad situation in life and we start to get defective with how we handle it, there's also no better way to approach for some fixing than the one who made us, God. And the bible is our manual. 

Did I sound like a Friday night reveler that dances to almost the same mix of music by saying that line? Maybe. But I am just reminding you that our thoughts can become our worst assassin if we would always think we know better in life than the one who made us. 

If you accept God as your creator and savior then His words will you hit you hard than a knife but will lift you up higher than a crane. 

Don't wait until you hop from one job to another, or move from a place or two. There's no way these external factors can help you. 

Photo Credits:
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29 Ways to Stay Creative...And be Positive

Strong is the new beautiful. And speaking of strong, here's a pet peeve: reading and discovering how to live  a more positive life but not actually knowing how to apply it when it's needed.

Great speakers and writers of creative and positive life share huge amount of tips on how to make just that. However has it that few of the real challenges in learning what they preach doesn't come with learning but in maintaining what was learned.

Most readers have the tendencies to get mastered by their thoughts and not mastering the way they think. Hence, forgetting the motivating lessons on how to live a creative and positive life.

On Losing Hopes and Giving Up

Life is mostly fair, at one point it is great. But that is of course when everything goes well and problems are easily resolved.

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It’s hard to warrant life as being good when too much problems hits you in the eye. When you’re laid off at work and your mother gets cancer; or you failed in the board exam five times, and went through a very painful annulment; or when the society attached you stigma simply because you fall short physically for a human eye.

People you know and who knows you in the same way work up to tell you that life can still get better if only you hold on to it. But you know to yourself that no one thing that they said has come up to give you a hasty remedy because the pain is engraved deeply, an unfathomable form of spiritual emptiness and clutter. Nobody in good shape of life can just plainly understand how difficult it is to get imprisoned in that kind emotional whack.

When the only legal thing life’s trials has ever done to you is to make you feel so deserving of misery, don’t you think it’s easier to give up and lose hope?

When God's Answer Doesn't Make Sense

I have been knuckling down myself, volunteering in a hospital for almost eight weeks. That’s nearly two months. And until now I really wonder how I was able to hold down close to months of physical and emotional burnout of working 40 hours every week without pay, and a slight amount of ill-humor from few random people around.

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Honestly, that is even far from other people’s experience. But one of the hardest parts of getting through bad situations is when you reach the point where you can no longer balance yourself well. It happened to me in the past few weeks.

I belong to an entire generation of Nurses who after graduating and getting the license hardly gets a paying job in the same profession. Or when we get a chance we have to start from scratch and become a “volunteer”. It’s one of the trending professional misplace these days. Even supposing, I still find it okay. Sometimes we really have to start from the bottom to get to where we want (the top).

There only came a point when I could no longer find my passion in what I was doing. At times I become so ambivalent of whether my motivations for entering into nursing were really right. Or if I ever had a wrong notion about it. 

Going on duty always seemed like a struggle each day. And often times I think of quitting and never coming back to the hospital again.

When my co-trainees ask me what my plans are after the training or if I’d still ever want to work in the hospital, I stutter and trip over my words hoping to find an answer I would not regret. But even I. Even I was racking to find my own answer to the question. 

I didn’t know what to do. I cried each night and found myself always praying that I would never do any harm to my patients despite the inner struggles I was having for weeks.

I’ve never been this negative in the several years past. But adequate enough to say that losing hopes amidst too much negative circumstance shots no one in exemption.

Why is Being Feminine Better than Being Sexy

                

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Someone who wears dress, speaks rightly so, and is able to give birth to a child-- a feminine that is. No need to be in tightly-fitted corset as how history describes it to be. What is considered “feminine” however varies from one culture to another (i.e. someone who gets married and submits to her husband is feminine to most Christian cultures while someone who is able to do tough labors is feminine to other tribes). 

But being feminine in general is something that exemplifies someone’s character as a woman.

There are women who capture a lot of people for their charm and personality; others though ensnare people like magnetizing music without even actually trying. They are the beautiful faces that most men find attractive to their almost delusive and futile desires. 

While there’s nothing wrong with how women fit themselves to shape good (Read: to be sexy), femininity is an influence that lasts longer and boosts better. And we’re not talking of plain aggrandizement. We’re talking of how femininity works at a higher advantage than simply pleasing.

Perhaps this goes to explaining that as women, we customarily associate ourselves into female preferences like learning how to bake, talking about the melodrama over cars that need tune-ups, and even desiring for a sexy body, sexy make-up, sexy hairstyle, and sexy outfit with gusto. But how will femininity give us pro?

Be aware that to be feminine is largely a matter of having good looks and good grooming. I don't mean that you need to look like Angelina Jolie; just start with the “physical level”. Gauge your wardrobe.

You absolutely have been looking for magazines or look books that would tell you precisely how to pull an outfit together-- with all the right accessories, shoes, and color combinations. Some if not all might have probably disappointed you with examples that are only suitable for fashion walk throughs. And I don’t want to put the same things forward. I want to share with you the best ideas. So ready your mind-and-heart-checklist.

Learn to Love Your (Naked) Self

How many times have you thought about being naked? Or so, have you ever thought about your own nakedness-- unclad, bare-skinned, and transparent? And when you have, what did you see and how did you feel about it?

                This entry has been inspired by Amy Bloom in her article from Oprah.com. Glory is to God for his never-ending inspiration through other people’s writings.

Love what you see l Image taken from weheartit.com

It’s not so often that we think of ourselves stripped off from our shoulder straps and our plaid printed pajamas heading to our bathrooms, washing up, and stepping out with our body half-ly covered with towel. People barely talk about nakedness in its literal sense and within the limits of it. Frequently, the scenes that follow in their minds are the ones that become daily challenge to men and women alike.  But that’s a separate point in question.

Amy Bloom said she went from pajamas to underwear to clothes every morning and back the other way every night. And no one had said anything to her about what a good time was to be had between pajamas and underwear. I thought with her experience that many of us, people in our subliminal sense still pass around the pleasant feeling of being at peace with our own brand of nakedness. Most of the time what we see in the mirror turns out to be unfavorable. It’s hardly ever that we come close to the mirror and see ourselves naked and smiling at the same time. Some  of us would only notice the cellulites that crowd in our hind end or the freckles and pimples that lay proudly across our face. 

Fit yourself around the confident few. If you’re not assured with how you look, it will obviously show. God for certain didn’t make a mistake in molding you into how you naturally look today. He’s the best of the best creators more than the famous sculptors and painters. He has the most perfect description of a human body. He made you exactly how you look. But he sure didn’t make you exactly how you feel with how you look. See the difference? And maybe what I’m trying to say is, it can be all about attitude.

Feeling unhappy about the way you look might have started since you were young.

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The Face of a Shadow

Photo by Thomas Leuthard 

How can I not remember you? You, whom I’ve first looked fixedly and assembled a world, a world that's fully-figured with enigmatic moods of upbringing. You, whom I’ve meted out a hundred laughs wrapped in a pavement blue and a thousand tears camouflaged in a crawl-way yellow. Inside you are testimonies of how I primed and morphed into this kind of mortal wit.

As I riffled through the old photographs, I can bare witness of the decades that passed. In an abode that served my family for more than 60 years, I can clearly see the memories. Contained in you is an alluring painting that turned gray-haired over time. The furniture, aristocratic in its own way, that only seemed exhausted a myriad ages.

So far, I only see nothing but changes. Now that things have taken me two decades of chargeless life, I only see nothing but living quarters that get emptier through the years.  And yes, these changes are the ones that naturally have to happen in ways no one can ever hold purse strings. Well, every human macrocosm has to face this dynamo of life.

In a minute when my crowded cranium decided to meet you in the flesh again, and this time in a more seasoned look, the contemporary milieu described me a litany of familiar shadows. And here’s one shadow that I just couldn’t seem not to seek. I find this shadow exactly similar to what I was seeing several primordial years back. 

Revolting curiosities really encouraged me to get to know whose, this shadow I’m seeing was. Finally, my senses discerned like hedonist, adroit agent of Whoop. Howbeit in these discoveries, a secluded aimless shadow is found. Rubbed confidence and self-regard surfaced like a floating albacore in a bombed sea world. And this shadow appears still so young. This is, as I’ve finally figured out, a shadow exactly similar but not entirely the same to what I’ve seen in the past. My heart goes out to this shadow but I just couldn’t get into a rescue. The help to defeat the Machiavellian thief that wears down this shadow’s identity is only about to come, from itself. 

The least thing I can do is to offer a lavish of prayer that someday soon, a bright incandescent will show up erasing to the boundless of times the face of this shadow that is yet unseen in the dark.

Image Credits:

Drop Shadow by Thomas Leuthard, flickr.com