self-development Archives - You can't stop the journey

Posted on April 30, 2024April 30, 2024 by Max Herrera

10 Tips for Loving Yourself

You’re a wondrous being, a miracle called life. You’re unique. You’ve followed a path, a path which has turned you into what you’re now: energy, dreams, smiles, a lovely human being. Maybe you want more things, maybe you wish for more… that’s OK. Don’t blame the past for anything, as such past has allowed you to be here. And that past is offering you the opportunity to be better. The Beatles said it: All you need is love. And for loving, we have to start by loving ourselves. We have to love ourselves, we have to accept ourselves as we are right now: with our fears, our limitations, our physical image, our weaknesses, and our beliefs. If you do not love yourself, how may you be able to really love others? If you don’t accept yourself, if you don’t love yourself, you’ll probably end up looking in other people for such traits and features you don’t have and would like to have for being happy… but you will likely end up being hurt if that people go away. Love yourself, right now:

Accept your weaknesses. They’re are part of you.
Forgive yourself. All those things that you “perceive” you have done wrong… they’re past. You don’t live in the past anymore. You can only control the present time. Past & Future are just images, not reality.
Express your feelings with total freedom.
Don’t worry about things you cannot have control over. Instead, focus on the only things you can really control: your decisions right now.
Trust your inner values and your personal resources. Don’t be afraid of losing, go ahead!
Believe in your positive experiences, believe there’s an abundance in health and life for you.
Don’t fight your negative thoughts or your fears… when you’re feeling negative or scared, thank your mind and your body for such thoughts and emotions, and leave them behind, you’re very positive and brilliant and have a lot of wonderful things to do.
Do this exercise: write a little and happy song about those things that you fear the most. And sing it occasionally 🙂
Do this other exercise: close your eyes and visualize yourself as a small child. Imagine this child laughing and running through some beautiful scenery, full of colors, full of life. Hug this child close to you. Tell him or her how much they are loved, and how special he or she is.
Enjoy your body and care of it through nutrition and exercise (both physical and mental).

Life is beautiful. Enjoy it 🙂

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Max Herrera

Building a Network of Contacts

There are plenty of available jobs in the market, and there also are a lot companies recruiting right now, but it is possible that those job openings are never advertised or published in newspapers or on the Internet. Further, important or high-rank job openings are rarely advertised. How to approach this hidden job market? Certainly, it’s not enough to investigate listings of job openings. The key is word-of-mouth or networking.

Networking means building a list of contacts. Contacts are people you’ve met during your business or social activities. More often than not, such friends and acquaintances will provide you information about job openings, companies and industry leads. Moreover, they’ll introduce you to other so that you can grow your network. Therefore, it is important not only to inform them about your job search, but also give them some résumés.

This list will provide some hints about the people and organizations we should include in our network:

Relatives
Friends
Recruiters
Former Employers
Neighbors
Professional Organizations
Other Job Seekers
Academic Contacts (School, University)
Business Associations
Merchants

Organizing your Network of Contacts

Please, organize your network. Save information about your contacts in a spreadsheet or a database. Include their names, titles, company, address, phone and fax numbers, and email. It’s also important to register a few notes about the way in which any of your contacts is valuable, for instance, what do they know?, who can they refer you to?, and so on. Further, organize their business cards.

Posted on December 4, 2023December 4, 2023 by Max Herrera

Three Gifts

A well respected landowner required the services of a woodcutter. Soon, a burly man volunteered for the job. The landowner explained that, in order to get approved to the job, any candidate should axe down, in a single day, a leafy and huge cedar that was in front of his house. Faced with the daunting task, the woodcutter replied: “For Gods, maybe. But I don’t believe this chore to be humanly possible, so I retreat.” A second woodcutter arrived asking for the job, but once he heard the condition, it seemed to him that the landowner had become crazy. Like this, many other woodcutters rejected the job. But one burning morning, other lumberer applied for the job. It seemed that the cedar was too large for his slight and somewhat dandified figure. The condition was the same, but this woodcutter’s response was: “Sure, Good Lord, I can chop down this tree, but I beg you the permission to start working not today, but tomorrow at dawn… that way, I’ll have enough time to open the trunks and put them to dry before the sun hides his face.” This response, firm and self-confident, convinced the landowner of this man’s suitability for working in his estate.

“The job is yours, but don’t dare touch a single leaf of this quaint tree with your axe… this is a lovely tree, whose shade gives shelter to my kids and peace to my family. You’ve passed the test.”

And so the years passed by, and the landowner never regretted of hiring the woodcutter. During all those years of strenuous work the woodcutter had not returned to his village, and had not seen his family. That’s why the landowner decided it was time for the woodcutter to rest and to return to his village. As a token of gratitude, a big farewell party was held for the woodcutter. It was a prize to the woodcutter’s fidelity and good performance. On that day, the woodcutter recalled many joyful things he had lived in the estate. His boss’ family presented him with a lot of objects and gold as gifts. He received plenty of gifts. Collected so many that he required one horse and two mules to carry his gifts. When he departed, he was accompanied to the outskirts of the estate by two pawns. They were talking about the best path that our woodcutter should take to reach his destination faster. The two pawns were of the view that the trail was the shortest path.

Posted on November 23, 2023November 23, 2023 by Max Herrera

Meditation Gems: Appearances

Let’s continue with our condensed Meditation Gems series. Today we’ll discuss appearances, an ancient concern. As far back as Aesop‘s fable, The Ant and the Chrysalis, the moral “Appearances are deceptive” is present. We have to acknowledge that self-confidence relies greatly on how we see ourselves. Whether this inner perception represents the stairway to a broader and successful vision of life, or is the path to ruin, depends solely upon ourselves. The things we think about and the things we do define our true identity. People afraid of failures skip from one idea to another almost endlessly, and thereby rarely get hold of success. Facing the hard circumstances of the real world, our fears would recommend to step back in order to avoid (possible) injuries. Self-confidence provides the fuel to fight these fears. The world belongs to brave people. Nevertheless, being brave does not mean to live recklessly, as self-confidence also allows us to realize our limits as imperfect human beings. The key word is balance. For self-confidence, bravery must join forces with humility. Being afraid of failure opens the door to appearances, but being unaware of failure leads to frustration. When the required balance is disrupted, desperate for filling up the void, we tend to recur to a harmful resource: appearances. With appearances we try to fill up the gap in our souls, related to our need for faking our limitations and guising them as “intentional” patterns in our life.

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Max Herrera

10 Short Tips for Keeping Anxiety at Bay

Anxiety is a (sometimes annoying) emotional and cognitive state. Emotionally, we recognize it as sensations of fear, grief, worry or general apprehension. The cognitive component entails expectation of a diffuse and uncertain danger. The threat or perspective of danger triggers the body’s defenses: the flow of blood to the muscles is increased, which in turn implies rising blood pressure and heart rate. Needless to say, such alert activation involves a higher consumption of body’s energy, and also other parts, such as the immune system, are inhibited in order to increase energetic reserves and focus for fighting the hypothetical danger.

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Max Herrera

10 Exercises for Keeping a Young Mind

Simply put, your mind needs some exercise in order to stay young and healthy. The basis for brain’s life is processing of new data and stimuli. Our minds should be regularly exposed to updated information and new experiences, in order to reach higher levels of creativity, openness, speed, and adaptation. Looking for new ways of thinking is an excellent exercise for being smarter and more sociable. Nevertheless, in the following I detail a neat list of simple exercises for keeping a young mind and improving our minds’ state:

Posted on December 18, 2019October 30, 2023 by Max Herrera

Achieving Personal Goals

Hello, this is the first content post in You can’t stop the journey. Here, we’ll speak about achieving personal goals. First, do you know what a goal is? According to Wikipedia’s entry:

An objective or goal is a personal or organizational desired end point in development. It is usually endeavored to be reached in finite time by setting deadlines.

And that’s it. A personal goal is that thing you really want to achieve. Normally, achieving personal goals is not an isolated thing. On the contrary, they imply several subgoals you have to reach first. In this sense, we have to define how we are going to conduct ourselves in order to reach the subgoals. Remember, it’s not only the arriving point what matters… the integrity you show while following your path is the most important fact.

Now, what are your life’s goals? Or better stated, what do you want? Money? Family? Health? Education? Fame? A superb job? Please, answer this first honestly. Reaching goals that hold personal meaning to you increases the feeling of happiness. Oh, and… where do you belong? To the material or to the spiritual type?

Now, before continuing, do you have the bases to achieve your general goals? Let’s assume you want that very-well-paid-job. Do you have the required education? No? Then you have to introduce a subgoal related to academic formation. Yes? Then, have you researched the job’s field thoroughly? Do you know the current information trends related to that job? Do you know what is the state-of-the-art in such knowledge area? Do you know who are the best representants of that job? What are the biggest companies? Now, do you have a solid contacts network? Please, start thinking, and start answering.

My own goal with this post is to flame your awareness, cognition and self-view on yourself. That’s the starting point of the journey we will be revisiting in upcoming posts.