Change – Pagina 6 – Crisbie Coach

How And Why Reinventing Yourself. Find It Out by Following These 6 Steps

Have you ever wanted to reinvent your life? Have you tried several times but failed? Reinventing yourself professionally or personally can be a challenge but also a great adventure. Follow these 6 steps to succeed.

First step: find or wake up one of your passion.

Concluding one phase and starting another one is not easy. Reinventing yourself requires more commitment than a simple change. Consequences may impact vital aspects of your daily life and a lot of courage and determination are needed.

The pandemic phase has forced all of us to look within and it is possible that many of us are dealing with the need of reinventing ourselves. There will be some who feel empty and need to do something to fill the empty spaces, others who have been forced to reinvent themselves due to the loss of a family member or a friend, others due to difficulties with their work.

For one reason or another, these are times when you need to stop to reflect and make decisions. Let’s see how to deal with this situation.

Reinventing yourself in a satisfactory way presupposes confronting yourself with one of the most uncomfortable emotions that exist: fear. You will be forced to leave your comfort zone and take a leap in the dark. The best antidote to fear is passion. It is the first success factor in a “reinvention” phase. Finding your passion, or awakening it, is only possible if you are honest with yourself. You have to ask yourself questions like:

who I really am;
what I want to do;
which of my passions can help me in this moment.

An honest reflection and re-discovery your old dreams are the fundamental ingredients to neutralize fear and not fearing the future.

The second factor that will help you is not to assess uncertainty as a danger but as an opportunity. It is a question of letting go nostalgia and opening up to the experience of the “new”, so that to focus on what you want and not on what you fear.

To achieve this, you must be willing to learn with humility. If you think you already know everything, it is difficult to be able to start over in any area of your life in a satisfactory way. The success of those who are successful is only the tip of the iceberg, behind there are hours and hours of training and mistakes that are barely seen.

Facing the future and uncertainty also requires a great deal of creativity and imagination. When reinventing yourself, it is important to keep a compass to map the path you are taking. The future is not written anywhere, it is up to you to create it and to do so you need our imagination and hard work.

Reinventing yourself means knowing yourself from another perspective and being surprised by the opportunities that suddenly begin to present themselves. If we want your new self to be successful, you need to go out and make yourself known. For this, it is essential to strengthen your network of contacts.

The final ingredient for your success is to be self-confident, because you are capable of doing things you do not even imagine. But you need to learn to use the resources you have and find others available around you.

To conclude, here are the six ingredients to successfully reinvent yourself:

find / awaken your passion to neutralize fear;
transform difficulties into opportunities;
learn, learn, learn;
use great creativity and imagination;
make yourself known;
be self-confident.

Are you ready to reinvent yourself now?

Bee Beep or the Paradox of Tranquillity

In the middle of the desert, a somewhat stupid coyote runs after a very clever bird. The two animals go at high speed.

Suddenly, the bird stops in front of a precipice. The coyote, on the other hand, continues to run without looking until it realizes it is running in the air.

This scene is a classic of Bee Beep and the coyote.

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But it is also the perfect illustration of a very serious economic theory: the hypothesis of financial instability.

According to Hyman Minsky, all periods of economic prosperity contain the elements of a future crisis. Like what? It is simple. When all goes well, economic agents (households, businesses, the State) are trustful and borrow money to carry out projects, invest, and develop activities.

In this good environment, investors risk more; banks lend money more easily, without paying too much attention to the danger of not being repaid. Minsky calls this the “paradox of tranquillity”.

However, at some point, the whole economy lives on credit. It then happens that other, more worrying phenomena arise: unemployment, slowdown in activities, lower income, and difficulty in repaying. Despite this, economic agents continue to behave as if nothing had happened. Just like when the poor coyote runs in the air!

Some bad news are enough to trigger the “Minsky moment“: everyone wakes up suddenly and gets scared. We realize that risks can no longer be taken, loans cannot be repaid, and banks stop lending money.

It is the general crisis: the coyote is too busy to realize it is about to fall on deaf ears. And it is too late to avoid to fall. The same happens in the real world.

And what about you, has it ever happen to you to live a Minsky moment?

Di شہاب – Opera propria, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44752971

August Blues

I look forward August with impatience as for me it represents the top of summer time, that is my favourite period of the year. July prepares myself to August that comes full of expectations and good intentions.

However, at the end of the summer I find myself dealing with what I have actually achieved and I am not always happy with the results.

It happens that often my expectations are misaligned with reality and this causes me frustration and distress that reaches its top at the end of the summer. The idea of not having enjoyed the summer period as I wanted and the thought of the “going back to work” around the corner might turn the last days of vacation into moments of anxiety and suffering.

The August melancholy is known as “August Blues”, the boredom and the dissatisfaction that may become a real malaise of the season.

Therefore, this year I decided to anticipate it and I identified four suggestions so to avoid being overwhelmed by it:

spending time outdoors: natural light, fresh air and nature help psychophysical well-being and allow us to look at situation with more detachment and serenity;
thinking about the positive moments: we all have had for sure beautiful experiences that brought us some benefits, even though small ones. They will help us to add value to the time spent. Sometimes our mind plays with us and makes us not very objective;
scheduling your time: we are all different and there are people who can go back to work straight after their flight back home but there are others who need some time to recover from the shock of returning home from holidays. Listen to your needs and plan your time accordingly;
last but not least, show awareness: learning to recognize the first signs of your distress will help you to manage it better and to prevent it from overwhelming you.

What about you? Have you ever experienced the August Blues?

Dispel Those 7 Beliefs About Solutions For Heatwaves

During heatwaves like the one we are going through, being in fresh areas, not going out during the central hours of the day and drinking lot of water (not iced water) is surely recommended. However, there are practices that are bad ideas, wrong beliefs and that you should avoid.

Photo by Massimiliano Martini on Unsplash

I do not feel hungry so I do not eat. During periods of strong heat, it is recommended to eat foods with a high water content, such as strawberries (in Belgium we still have them and they are very good!), cucumbers, watermelon, melon, salad, courgettes, tomatoes and peppers. Everything that the summer season offers us. Nature always provide us with the best solution for every period of the year. You can also eat sorbets, yoghurt and white cheese. What you must avoid are fatty meals, because the digestion of fats involves an effort of the body that increases body temperature and consequently the perceived heat.
Using the air conditioning at its maximum power. Using air conditioning is recommended but the temperature must be adjusted to a maximum of 10 degrees C lower than the outside one. Of course, if the outside temperature is 40 degrees C, 30 will be still a high temperature. However, a big gap between the outside and the insider temperatures weakens the body. And don’t forget to clean the filters.
Drinking very hot drinks. A legend tells that people living in the desert use to drink very hot teas to fight the heat. However, this is not necessarily a good idea, actually it is what it is: a legend. The body temperature is around 37 degrees. Consuming a hotter drink would mean forcing the body to sweat and therefore going forward dehydration to eliminate the accumulated heats. Ideally, you should drink liquids between 12 and 14 degrees C.
While sleeping, directing the fan to your face. A person who directs the fan towards the face in the morning will have dry nose, mouth and eyes. This is likely to give you a headache but you will definitely have a stuffy nose. It is recommended to put the fan a little further away from the bed and not to direct it to your face.
Drink at least three litres of water a day. Actually, drinking a quantity of water between one and a half and two litres is more than enough. In case of over consumption the body will be forced to eject more through sweating or peeing, in this latter case overloading the kidneys.
Nothing better than a beer to stay hydrated. Actually, alcohol dehydrates. If you drink a glass of beer, you must then drink water to compensate for the loss of water. Coffee and tea are also drinks that you do not want to drink too often for the same reason. Obviously, all carbonated and sugar-containing drinks are absolutely to be avoided.
I wait for being thirsty before drinking. When you feel thirsty, it is already late. Your body is warning you that you have lost water. Experts recommend drinking small amounts of water often rather than a lot of water in a few moments of the day. It is important to keep the body hydrated throughout the day to avoid headaches, dizziness or feelings of fatigue.

And you, what habits have you adopted to fight heat waves like that one of this summer?

5 Tips to Help You Sleeping During This Super Hot Summer

If you don’t have air conditioning like me (living in Brussels, I thought it was rare to exceed 30 degrees, while the last few summers are showing the opposite), the high temperatures of this period could prevent you from having a quality sleep. It goes without saying that a good sleep allows you to be in good shape the next day, productive and less stressed.

Here are some tips to help you refresh the atmosphere and sleep better:

choose cotton on your skin. Even though it may seem to you that a light cotton tee-shirt will warm you up during the night, it is actually better because the cotton will absorb sweat;
put a wet bed sheet in front of an open window. It will cool the air down;
don’t take a cold shower before going to bed, otherwise your body will have to raise its temperature to reach its normal one. Take a warm shower and put only your hands and feet into cold water;
pass an aloe vera or a mint stick on the temples and wrists to get a refreshing effect;
drink a hot herbal tea to cause a hot-cold shock to your body also for a refreshing effect.

Are you ready to try them out?

Walking on Stilts

1980, Quebec City. People rush to meet three exhausted travellers, who have just walked 90 kilometres in 22 hours…on stilts!

They had left for this trip to be noticed and raise funds. Their goal was setting up their own circus company, but not just like the others.

At the time, circus companies still followed the main rules established at the beginning of the twentieth century by the showman Phineas Barnum. A show was to include trained animals, stellar acrobats, clowns for children.

In the 1980s, hundreds of circus companies competed fiercely to attract an increasingly rare audience. Yes, things have changed: the circus is no longer popular compared to the cinema or the television.

Result: circuses earn less and less money.

Our young waders say it is time to reinvent the circus, thus changing the business model.

Photo by Alejandro Contreras on Unsplash

Thanks to their genius, the three friends got their first funding and launched their project: the Cirque du Soleil.

Pets and animals? That’s enough! We don’t want to see them in cages any more, and it costs too much to keep them healthy. The stellar acrobats? Okay, long live to young talents, unknown and motivated. Clowns? We keep the principle but let them do things that make adults laugh too. The sand track and the badly heated tent? Never again, the Cirque du Soleil offers comfortable space and beautiful decorations.

And it works! The new model finds their audience and it is known all over the world. Some of the founding waders even become billionaires.

Now, however, with the Covid-19 crisis, the management of Cirque du Soleil has filed for bankruptcy protection at the end of June. With bankruptcy, Cirque du Soleil aims to restructure its debt with assistance from the Canadian government and private equity firms, to be able to return enchanting their millions of fans around the world with their acrobatic shows.

Would you like to wish to Cirque du Soleil a fast recovery from their debt situation?

Why Travelling Locally?

Travelling abroad is nice. But do you really need to cross a border to enjoy you holidays? I am not sure about it. Every country has unique sites, cultures and heritage.

Stay local. Especially in our times, after the COVID-19 outbreak, we need to support our economy. Economy needs support right now. When being a tourist in your own country you’re actively supporting your own economy. All the money you spend boosts tourism revenue and helps out local businesses.

Save money. A big trip can be quite costly, so why not spend it lots of mini trips? Save on flights and accommodation and use the extra money on more fun activities.

Learn more about your country. Every country has their own history and heritage. With domestic travel you actually might pick up a thing or two. You’ll be able to learn a lot and who knows, gain a deeper connection with your homeland.

Don’t worry about the language. Good thing with staying local is that you don’t have to worry about getting lost in translation.

What do you think about staying local this summer?

Why Don’t you STUFF?

STUFF (acronym for Stand-up for Fitness) for someone like me, who has been suffering from Restless legs syndrome (RLS) for almost one year, is very helpful.

Did you know that sitting for too long may be considered as smoking for what concerns the risk of chronic health problems? Too much sitting could be the cause of heart diseases, diabetes and some cancers, and also mental health troubles.

For RLS people like me, sitting for too long is just impossible. Generally speaking, I cannot sit longer than one hour! My legs feel the need to move. Therefore, I work standing all day long and I walk long distances every day. It helps me sleeping, even though sometimes is not enough and I spend sleepless nights (but in such cases I think the cause might also be anxiety or stress).

But also if you don’t suffer from RLS interrupting long sitting periods by short breaks, for instance, interrupting sitting every 30-45 min by standing for at least 10-15 minutes, is very healthy.

Even if you are an active person, more than 6 hours sitting per day has negative effects you cannot compensate for. Have a look at this video, read some fact and practise STUFF by, for instance: