carladoria.lasultimasfamilias.com

Tag: beliefs

  • How to make your kid an avid reader/writer

    How to make your kid an avid reader/writer

    I never post advice for parents, but I thought this title was actually the objective of this post.

    “This is your vacation homework.” my mom would say. When I was a kid, my mother used to prepare vacation homework for me. I was the only kid in the family and didn´t have many friends, so on school vacation, I actually got bored watching TV. Since I was an obedient kid, I would think of my mom´s “vacation homework” as something I had comply with or I would be facing some severe scolding. Most of this homework was reading, and that is the best gift that my mom ever gave me.

    elizabeth street

    Image source: www.elizabethstreet.com

    I was born, grew up, and still live in Bolivia, a country where if you say you´re a writer, people would look at you with disbelief and even pity.  Writers don´t make any decent earnings here, and of course it´s never a good career choice. So as a normal young girl, with very good grades, I went for what I thought was an excellent career choice for me and for everybody else in my family: “Industrial Engineering”. Just the name sounded good, hard, complicated, and something that everybody else could be proud of, with lots of job´s opportunities, good salaries, and all the things that people advised you when you graduate from high school.

    I´ve never received the advice “do you what you love to do, what you´re passionate about” and I wish I had.

    story will continue… 

    P.S. I came up to the conclusion, that in our current lives where we get tons of emails, blog posts, and so on… the shorter the better, so I decided to write short posts from now on…but I will try to make them to sound as complete as possible on their own…

  • HOW HARD IS IT TO BE PERSISTENT?

    So, PERSISTENCE, what is the definition of PERSISTENCE?

    The Oxford dictionary says

    “the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition”

    Well, we can understand this meaning, it is simple, and everybody knows it, but can we understand it well enough to apply it in our lives?

    Since I remember, I use to make plans for improving my life; I would make things like these ones:

    1. Make a written, signed contract where I compromise myself with improving in all aspects: losing weight, going to the gym, learning mandarin or Italian (whatever was I felt I needed to learn at that time), read 3 books per month, learn this or that, etc.I would get to do this for a couple of days, maybe a week and then I would get weaker and I would just forget it.
    2. I would also do more detailed plans, I would write my resolutions in a paper, make detailed plans to achieve them and even set daily goals. I would buy a diary or notebook, just specifically for this purpose. I would start with all my enthusiasm and then the same would happen, I would forget it or just get consumed with the daily routine.

    So this is the summary of the dozens of times that I have tried different approaches. Some methods would work better than others, but always at the end I was swallowed with the everyday routine.

    Image

    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

    At this very moment, I´m with one method, I have a little notebook at work where I write the hours of the day and try to assess every hour I let pass, so I just put a happy or sad face next to it when I feel an hour has been productive or not. Until now, it´s been lasting more than any method. But, I must admit it, there are hours, even days, where I forget about this thing and I find myself filling hours with sad faces trying to remember what I had done before. I hope this method lasts….

    But, besides this, I have actually realized the following: I´ve been persisting in improving my life, trying different methods but with the same idea: improving. So I have accused myself many times of not being persistent enough and it´s is true, in some ways… after all, the most difficult thing to achieve in life for me has being persistence.

    But the idea is to persist right? And I have persisted in figuring it out these methods, even when they didn´t work, I would look for another one… little step by little step, mistake by mistake, and at the end NEVER SURRENDER…

    And more than anything never stop persisting in trying to achieve our dreams, no matter how our methods are, but never give up on our dreams, never forget them….

    I would like to finish with this quote:

    “If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of Persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked seventy times and get up off the floor saying, Here comes Seventy One!”

    DeVos, Richard

    Image

    Image source: www.empowernetwork.com

  • FIND THE “RIGHT PEOPLE” TO BE WITH YOU

    Image

    So this post may be a continuation or probably a contradiction of the one called “You are the result of the 5 people that hang out with you the most: WRONG”, but don’t be disappointed, this won’t be more ramblings about the same topic but rather a different and more interesting point of view.

    So in that previous blog, in summary, we said:

    –          One has to fight to find their uniqueness and not engage in the same behaviour as the people surrounding them.

    –          One should define its own character so well, that we’re not influenced by those traits we don’t believe in, especially from our friends or family.

    Don’t worry, I still agree with this and I’m not going to argue it, BUT – always the big BUT – there is some true in the fact that you must look forward to be surrounded by people like you; and I don’t mean people that think, act or behave exactly like you, but people that intrinsically have the same BELIEFS as you. Yep, that’s the word I was struggling to find when I was thinking, this afternoon, about writing this blog.

    If you are a true believer that with perseverance you can make your dreams come true, no matter what dreams are; then it’s actually discouraging to be with people who think that you are such a dreamer, or don’t get your point in focusing in something that you probably won’t achieve according to them.

    Well, I know sometimes our closer friends and relatives will be this crashing- dreamer types and that we won’t able to get far away from them. But we must look for and try to find those people (or at least internet contacts) that have our same BELIEFS, so that we feel energized, and motivated. Because sometimes it’s not enough to be our own drivers and motivators, sometimes we need a hand or a little push.

    Image

    So if you just spotted somebody that is a BELIEVER like you, get the chance to know that person, you may find a good friend in him or her, and who knows, maybe the path to achieving everything you always wanted to will be easier with some support by your side.

    You noticed that I mentioned “Internet contacts” before, well actually as a loner,     I´m not the “expert”  in giving advice of how to make friends, but I found that the least I could do was engage on online communities, or blogs with people that help me feel encouraged to follow my dreams (I may explore this topic deeper in a future post) but If I spot some positive thinker and believer like me in my neighborhood, I may introduce myself…

    So what do you think? Do you think it is good to find BELIEVERS like you?