Doing my Résumé causes me deep distress. No idea why!

I’ve been working on my Résumé today (and for the last couple of days).  A task that I particularly hate.  I struggle to make myself ‘sound good’ and really don’t enjoy it.  It’s been doing my head in.  I find myself asking (in my head) “am I really any good?”  and seem to spiral into a bit of negativity.  Then, I’m thinking about all the stuff that shows I’m good to work with, good with people and technically competent.

For example, I remember the early days of my career when I got ‘poached’ by a manager internally after I helped her with a problem - I had just treated her the same as everybody else - I hadn’t realised that she was a manger.  She was delighted with my friendliness and the way I helped her, and got me moved onto her team.

So yeah, I was only 23 then, and maybe over the ensuing years I became jaded and burnt out?

In 2003 I was coming up to finishing a 6 month contract, I didn’t want to remain working there as the environment was pretty bad.  (Very Negative and so busy I’d often do an 8 hour day without a bathroom break - just eating a muesli bar or two for lunch and not moving my body all day - couldn’t even get to the tap for a drink of water.) It was not healthy.  Doing 16-18 hour days EVERY DAY.  

Anyhow, as the 6 month contract was coming to an end I started letting people know that I wouldn’t be renewing it.  They DOUBLED MY SALARY to get me to stay on for another 5 months.  They wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been good at my job and good to work with.

After this experience I didn’t want to work in IT anymore.  It was a horrific place to work, and many of my work colleagues were on medication for depression and under horrendous amounts of stress.  Even my sunshine-nature couldn’t brighten up that place!

Then I think of my work at the City of Port Phillip, which I left, and worked elsewhere for a number of years, but then ended up back there a couple of times on different IT projects.  If I was “no good” and if people didn’t like working with me, then they’d never have pulled the strings to get me back in there and have me as part of the team once again.  Clearly my IT Skills and my personality are working in my favour.

But the mind does funny things.  It presents different situations in my life as evidence that I’m a failure as a human being. For example, it holds the fact that I still rent (rather than owning my own property) as evidence of my failures, as evidence that I’m flawed, along with any other stuff it can fling at me.  This is not a unique phenomenon; as evidenced in Owen Fitzpatrick's very clever TEDx Talk:

"Mind Control: How to win the war in your head"

And then I’ve to do up the darn resume.  It simply lists where I’ve worked and when, and the IT projects I’ve completed while there.  It doesn’t say any of the stuff that shows people enjoy working with me, enjoy having me on their team, nor how hard I work. Because I chose to TRAVEL after working my ass off, doing crazy hours for months on end on an IT project, because I chose to visit India and Pakistan, Thailand and Laos, Malaysia, Ireland, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, Moldova, Bulgaria, Turkey, NEPAL (in capitals because it was the BEST TRIP EVER!!!), plus other countries,  because I chose to see something of the World rather than just the inside of an Office!  Because I took months off work to go explore, there are these big gaps in my resume that look dodgy!

And so I procrastinate and fail to send the resume to the person I’m supposed to email it off to.

I know I’m good to work with, I know I know my stuff (or at lest used to!  Now stuff is in the cloud I’m a bit out of date with the latest technological stuff, it has to be admitted.)

But all I can see as I review my Resume is all these holes where I went off travelling - including the months and months I spent in Ireland once my brother became ill.

And for some reason I don’t understand, my mind tells me “I’m not good enough” and I don’t send it.  I keep feeling that my skills are out of date, and *if* I get to interview, it will be a dreadful embarrassment - OR WORSE - they might actually employ me and I'd have no life again!  (I tend to become a workaholic and just work, work, work!)

and so the procrastination goes on……

and on….

and on….

So my question to you is:   APPLYING FOR A CORPORATE IT POSITION, how do I let them know I’m good to work with, and that they need me, without sounding weird or arrogant or whatever?

For years my reputation has got me jobs, and I haven’t had to do up a Resume since around 2010.  Now that I’m doing it, I’m struggling!   This opportunity only arose because of my personality - so why do I doubt myself so much?  Why do I waste time on this Bullsh!t?  It would just be quicker to get the darn thing done rather than agonise over it for days and days!!!  Does anyone else do this sort of rubbish to themselves???

Please tell me; how do I let them know I’m good to work with, and that they need me, without sounding weird or arrogant or whatever?

That’s what I need to do!

Thank you

Great tools and Android Apps for mindset, Meditation and general happiness

If you have an Android phone, I really recommend that you install this “Positive Affirmation” app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mindfsck.Pos 

I totally love this.  You can put in your own affirmations, and get randomly reminded of them on your phone throughout  the day or the week.  (it asks you how frequently you want to be reminded when you put in the text)   It also allows you to receive random positive affirmations from their library.  I only discovered it 4 or 5 days ago, and I am delighted with it.

Another great thing I discovered in the last month is Marisa Peer.  

(Check out https://www.marisapeer.com/  – I love her 43 minute talk “You can be enough”.)   I’m now doing an 8 week course with her that involves listening to Hypnotherapy recordings each day.  I love it. 

If you want help rewiring your brain, checkout Waveen Android App:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gdlvalley.waveen    Have you ever heard of Brain Entrainment?  Or Binaural beats or Isochronic tones?    I’ve a subscription to https://www.brain.fm which I find excellent when I want to really focus to do some work, or when I want to drift off to a deep sleep.   The only problem is it doesn’t have a phone app.  You have to stream it from the website.  So I went searching for an app that would mean I could have my phone in Aeroplane mode while sleeping, but still let my brain hear the relaxing beats and pulses.  That’s when I found Waveen.  I still prefer Brain.FM, but at least Waveen’s free (although it does still stream and need my WiFi on when I'm trying to sleep)!   Brain.FM is brilliant.  I really love it.

The other app I love is a free one that helps me mediate.  I LOVE the 6 phase mediation that includes forgiveness, gratitude, visualisations etc.  It’s just the biz.   Here’s the app:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.omvana.mixer   OMVANA  (from MindValley.)  You have to down load the app (which comes with some free beginner meditations) then from inside the app you can download the “6 Phase Meditation” all for free.   The 5 minute “Growing your light” is a nice one too, if you haven’t much time or are on a short train journey.  What an excellent way to recharge your batteries, eh?  :-)

I like to listen to one of Marisa Peers Hypnotherapy recordings as I fall asleep at night (you can get a free one on “Lovability” from her webpage.) Then in the morning, I listen to another hypnotherapy recording, followed by a mediation from Omvana.  The morning process can take 25 minutes to an hour, depending on which meditations I choose, but boy do you feel great when you’ve designed your perfect day, had visions of your ideal life 3 years from now, and experienced forgiveness, love and gratitude and happiness before you’ve even got out of bed!

Such a great way to start the day!

About an hour and twenty minutes north of Brisbane in a rural place called Maleny is the Tesla Starhenge.  http://www.teslasstarhenge.com/   This is amazing, a beautiful experience.   There is now one of them in Geelong (which I have visited) but I didn’t enjoy it as much as because it’s inside, and you are looking at a whitewashed wall instead of at Nature. You sit inside it for 30 minutes, and it balances your energy fields of the body.

Here’s an article about it:  http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/power-of-tesla-plates-to-unlock-inner-health/2625676/

Here’s a link to the Facebook page of the Geelong Starhenge in Victoria:  https://www.facebook.com/StarhengeSolutions  You can see a picture and price list on this page.   If you want to book it, go here: http://www.teslasstarhenge.com/contact-yvette-page.php  Yvette is the owner of the Geelong one.

18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick

While we are on the subject of Habits, here is an article I found on LifeHacker:

18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick

Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything run on autopilot? Chores, exercise, eating healthy and getting your work done just happening automatically. If you program behaviors as new habits you can take out the struggle.

With a small amount of initial discipline, you can create a new habit that requires little effort to maintain. Here are some tips for creating new habits and making them stick:

1. Commit to Thirty Days – 3-4 weeks is all the time you need to make a habit automatic. If you can make it through the initial conditioning phase, it becomes much easier to sustain. A month is a good block of time to commit to a change since it easily fits in your calendar.

2. Make it Daily – Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple times will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.

3. Start Simple – Don’t try to completely change your life in one day. It is easy to get over-motivated and take on too much. If you wanted to study two hours a day, first make the habit to go for thirty minutes and build on that.

4. Remind Yourself – Around two weeks into your commitment it can be easy to forget. Place reminders to execute your habit each day or you might miss a few days. If you miss time it defeats the purpose of setting a habit to begin with.

5. Stay Consistent – The more consistent your habit the easier it will be to stick. If you want to start exercising, try going at the same time, to the same place for your thirty days. When cues like time of day, place and circumstances are the same in each case it is easier to stick.

6. Get a Buddy – Find someone who will go along with you and keep you motivated if you feel like quitting.

7. Form a Trigger – A trigger is a ritual you use right before executing your habit. If you wanted to wake up earlier, this could mean waking up in exactly the same way each morning. If you wanted to quit smoking you could practice snapping your fingers each time you felt the urge to pick up a cigarette.

8. Replace Lost Needs - If you are giving up something in your habit, make sure you are adequately replacing any needs you’ve lost. If watching television gave you a way to relax, you could take up meditation or reading as a way to replace that same need.

9. Be Imperfect – Don’t expect all your attempts to change habits to be successful immediately. It took me four independent tries before I started exercising regularly. Now I love it. Try your best, but expect a few bumps along the way.

10. Use “But” – A prominent habit changing therapist once told me this great technique for changing bad thought patterns. When you start to think negative thoughts, use the word “but” to interrupt it. “I’m no good at this, but, if I work at it I might get better later.”

11. Remove Temptation - Restructure your environment so it won’t tempt you in the first thirty days. Remove junk food from your house, cancel your cable subscription, throw out the cigarettes so you won’t need to struggle with willpower later.

12. Associate With Role Models - Spend more time with people who model the habits you want to mirror. A recent study found that having an obese friend indicated you were more likely to become fat. You become what you spend time around.

13. Run it as an Experiment - Withhold judgment until after a month has past and use it as an experiment in behavior. Experiments can’t fail, they just have different results so it will give you a different perspective on changing your habit.

14. Swish - A technique from NLP. Visualize yourself performing the bad habit. Next visualize yourself pushing aside the bad habit and performing an alternative. Finally, end that sequence with an image of yourself in a highly positive state. See yourself picking up the cigarette, see yourself putting it down and snapping your fingers, finally visualize yourself running and breathing free. Do it a few times until you automatically go through the pattern before executing the old habit.

15. Write it Down – A piece of paper with a resolution on it isn’t that important. Writing that resolution is. Writing makes your ideas more clear and focuses you on your end result.

16. Know the Benefits - Familiarize yourself with the benefits of making a change. Get books that show the benefits of regular exercise. Notice any changes in energy levels after you take on a new diet. Imagine getting better grades after improving your study habits.

17. Know the Pain – You should also be aware of the consequences. Exposing yourself to realistic information about the downsides of not making a change will give you added motivation.

18. Do it For Yourself - Don’t worry about all the things you “should” have as habits. Instead tool your habits towards your goals and the things that motivate you. Weak guilt and empty resolutions aren’t enough.

By Scott H Young

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/18-tricks-to-make-new-habits-stick.html

How to break the Cookie Habit

On this journey of being an entrepreneur, I'm noticing I have many habits - some of them good, some of them bad habits that I need to change. Developing good habits that should lead me to success, and reprogramming the bad habits is something I want to do.  This video helps with that process!

How to break the Cookie Habit

How to break the cookie habit - Charles Duhigg



What are your Habits?

This video also lead me to:  http://charlesduhigg.com/additional-resources/ which has flowcharts explaining How to Break a Habit and How to Make a Habit  - worth a look!

Running your own business AKA "Turbocharged" Personal Growth and Development!

Working in a job

I hated my job. It was simple. I wanted to be doing something else. I wanted to be in control of my life, I wanted to be free to spend my time my way, not have it dictated to me by my job:

"You must be in the office by 9 am, and remain there until almost 6 pm, you must give each day of your life to this job, no matter if your heart wants to be free to go walk in the park on a sunny day, or if you want to read a book, or chat to that interesting person you've encountered..."

YOUR LIFE IS MINE!

I resented this, while also being grateful that I had a job in the first place - happy that I had something that gave me money to enjoy and people to interact with on a daily basis. Happy that I had something that challenged me and gave my brain a work-out! Your job is a funny thing. It's a love/hate relationship! At the end of the day I mainly resented HOW MUCH TIME it took from the rest of my life. I think I would have been quite happy with a 3 day working week. Dream jobs like that don't seem to exist in my industry, so I made the break, quit my job to become an Entrepreneur. Why? Because I valued FREEDOM more than the stability and security of nine to five. Also, I wanted to grow to be the best that I can be, and this is "turbocharging" my growth and personal development.

Working for myself

There have been so many learnings I almost don't know where to start! I knew before I started that I would learn so much about myself during this time, I knew I would need to grow and develop phenomenally in a short space of time. There were skills I simply did not have that I would need to develop quickly. I understood it would be a challenge. The interesting thing is, what I suspected the challenges would be, and what they actually turned out to be, were so different! I was way off the mark! I couldn't believe the things I missed from being an employee.

Issues I expected to encounter:

• Missing the camaraderie of my work mates (big change to be working alone from home with no-one to talk to all day, particularly for a social creature such as myself.)
• Missing my regular pay cheque!  (Now it would all be up to me - bit scary that!)
• potentially allowing myself to be distracted from the work I should be doing - Distraction was an issue I expected to encounter (and I have been right about this one!)
• Missing the daily commute (I know this sounds weird, but it got me out of the house each day, irrespective of the weather, and gave me an opportunity to interact with humanity, or read my book while on the train, and have a little bit of exercise and fresh air.) I'd notice the buds on the trees in Spring, eagerly watching out for signs of Summer on the way, I'd notice the colour of the leaves change as Summer came to an end. I'd take in the sights and smells each day. I knew I'd miss that.
• Procrastination: I knew I'd have to watch this carefully as I can tend to avoid doing the difficult and boring tasks that I am not interested in, and it will cause me to fail!

Stuff I had no idea I'd miss:

• Reporting back to someone. (There are days when you do heaps of good work, and feel proud of your achievements and progress, I miss the opportunity to share this win with someone and the 'feel good' feelings around that.) This really surprised me because I'd always perceived myself as someone who worked autonomously and didn't need management. I had no idea that I used to get approval and recognition from others.  I was completely unaware that that was a need in me.  It was only when there was no chance of it being fulfilled, that I became aware of the need!
• the biscuits in the canteen!  (They weren't great, but funny how months later you miss their taste!)
• the 'imposed' structure on my day.  I resented it, so imagine my surprise when I found I missed it?!  It meant I got up at a regular time, unlike these days.
• People to bounce ideas off / others to discuss issues with. I've noticed a tendency to 'get stuck' because of an issue - I know if I just had someone to explain the issue to, I'd instantly come up with the answer whilst I was discussing it. I hadn't realised I used the process of describing the issue to another as my method to see the problem (and therefore the appropriate solution) more clearly. As a way around this issue, I'm considering talking to a stuffed toy!  lol!  I know the answers are inside me, i'm just not sure how to tap into them without the verbalising process!  Really happy to hear your suggestions on this one folks!

Other Challenges:

• Getting disheartened.  The journey can sometimes seem very, very long and occasionally I have wished for a bit of encouragement from someone.  Something to re-introduce the vigor and momentum. Constantly being self-motivated can be difficult at times, when progress is slower than you'd like.  It's easy to get disheartened and feel like giving up, or think "This is never going to work, it's too hard."
• Not being able to see the value (for others) in my work.  Had to turn this one round pretty quickly in order to become productive again.

• "Fantasy land" expectations:  I had this idea that once I quit my job life would be perfect - I'd have time to exercise, time to prepare and eat healthy meals, time to meditate, read books, watch movies.  Time to catch up with friends without being stressed from the working day.  Gee, life was going to be so good, that all my wrinkles would disappear and my greying hair would start to vanish as my body recovered from the years of bad diet and lack of sleep! The new refreshed me would look ten years younger!  Because I'd meditate every day, my mind and consciousness would expand.  I'd be more peaceful and tap into that inner Wisdom.  I'd be this youthful, wise woman and BE THE BEST ME THAT I COULD BE! That was what life was going to be like, when I was in control of my own destiny... !     Ha!

The reality

I have certainly learnt so much about myself.  About my failings, my (previously unconscious) needs, my strengths, my weaknesses.  The most surprising one, is I've learnt just how important discipline and routine is!  For someone who values Freedom and tends to live a somewhat disorganised/chaotic and exciting life, that was a bit of a shock.  I must say, it's a most interesting journey and I am delighted and blessed to be able to do this.

Mindset video

This is a really interesting Video that I found - the thing I got from this is:
"there are endless possibilities and options available to us in the Universe, all we simply need to do is select the one we want from the options!

I hope you enjoy it

Welcome to my first Post

How often is it that you come across some inspiring, intriguing and entrancing articles, videos and photos on the web?

It happens all the time for me.  The problem is managing to keep track of them all.  Sometimes you don't have the time "right there and then" to read the entire article or view the video.   How many times has it happened that you come across something really interesting just before the train reaches your station and you have to stop your online viewing and it's hours before you get to pick it up again.

Sometimes you can be having a conversation with a friend months later, and you wish you could just remember where you saw that thing that has suddenly cropped up in the conversation ....

So I've come up with this - a blog where I'll put all the motivational and inspiring things I want to keep track of, and where I'll share some of my story as I embark on this journey of working for myself and becoming a better person.

Welcome to my Blog!  Let's enjoy this journey together     :)

Intrepid Traveller!
(Me rowing on the Lake in Pokhara, Nepal 2012)