Things I Am Discovering About Myself

I had many, many blog posts planned for June, along with a few personal plans that I wanted to get on with. Unfortunately, life had other plans for me. For the past two weeks, my workplace made it mandatory for a select few employees in senior positions to attend a training session on emotional intelligence–sessions that would begin after office hours and continue late into the evening.

I am not complaining; if anything I am quite happy and honored that I was chosen for this session. And I am finding every class helpful, even though some of the stress management techniques are things that I am already quite familiar with.

But I am noticing a few patterns in my way of thinking and approaching things, and it’s been an eye-opener.

For starters, I have noticed that when I create a plan, and something beyond my control occurs that requires me to deviate from my original plans and makes me put my intended tasks on hold, I start getting very tensed and anxious. I start feeling demotivated like I am running out of time.

Subconsciously I think I have been aware of this for a while now; because as I write this post, I am reflecting back on my previous wrap-up blog posts published in this blog, as well as some journal entries where I was essentially consoling myself, trying to make myself understand that it is completely okay that I had to put off some of my plans for later to focus on more urgent tasks.

What I was unable to do back then, however, was provide actual solutions to myself that convince the anxious voices in my head that I was on track.

This has been one of the most important lessons for me during the past two weeks of training. Journaling has always been my go-to solution for stress management, but rarely did I ever make bullet point lists of things that were bothering me, then wrote down the solutions to each problem, and the time it would take me to solve them.

This type of exercise helped bring things into perspective and made me realize that I was worried about little things needlessly. The more I wrote my problems down, and the solutions next to them, the more I could declutter my mind and make room for positive thoughts.

For example, one of the things that were really upsetting me for the past two weeks was how I was too exhausted after work and training to focus on my blog, my writing, or my studies. But as I sat down and thought about things rationally, of course, it would make sense for me to feel exhausted after TWELVE hours of work. I am not accustomed to such long shifts–I am fortunate enough to have a 9-5 job that strictly follows the 8 hours schedule, and discourages working after office hours. So, no wonder the past two weeks were a new challenge, and as with all new challenges, I needed to rest after coming home from work to recharge myself for another grueling day.

Understanding and accepting the reality of my situation has really helped me cope these past two weeks. Now, I just have to keep up this practice of introspection and self-counseling for the rest of the days to come.