I'm back baby 🙌🏼

Hello people. I'm really glad to be back and writing this post. It's been a while as you can see - I blame it on the shitmoosy month of November - I never liked it, never worked for me as a student, in my personal life nor my professional career. It's the time of year that I'm super unproductive at work, I experience the time change in London which, let's be honest, it sucks big time (4.30pm sunsets and grey skies aren't my thing). Doubt that will ever change, but hey let's be positive for the future.

As a reminder, I'm writing these posts because, simply, I just wanna share - and hopefully to be a source of inspiration, form a nice brew of thoughts or even be that small push to get those cogs turning that will lead to some curious discoveries.

Anyway, back to this post. What I wanted to share today is a list of 7 ways to love ourselves a bit more when life gets a little too much - something which, come on let's be honest, we tend to neglect more often than not! For these I drew inspiration from various sources on social media and personal development and spiritual books over the last months. I hope I managed to summarise these in a way that's easy to follow - but enough with the kerfuffle, here they are.

Exercise - it can feel daunting at times especially during these cold wintry days but honestly exercising, even for a 30-minute brisk walk, is one of my most liberating activities (especially when done early in the morning or when maxing it out in marathon events).
Cut off toxic people - probably my most important social principle. Stop hanging out, being 'friends' and keeping toxic people in our lives who are not even vibing in the same frequency as us! Keep the people who actually care, make us feel better, support us and are happy for us when we are.
Celebrate the wins - can't stress enough how important this is! Whether we had a good and productive day at work or had a successful exercise session, ALWAYS find a way to celebrate it, even something small. Get the cup of coffee from your favourite coffee shop, buy yourself a nice meal, rent that awesome movie that's not on Netflix or even better go and watch a new movie at your favourite cinema (something I did before returning to Cyprus a few weeks ago). It does act as a motivation to keep ourselves pushing for the next step and for more!
Invest in ourselves - thank God there are endless personal development tools, including videos on YouTube and other platforms (e.g. Patreon) that can help us learn a new skill and even pursue a passion of ours. Speaking of investments I recently purchased the productivity planner from Intelligent Change which I find incredibly useful (both for work and personal tasks)! Also don't underestimate the power of good podcasts as a source of inspiration! Here are my favourite ones for this month:
Make mistakes - give it a go, fail, make mistakes, start again, make different mistakes, restart until you learn and like where the beginning is going! Barack Obama once said "No matter the difficulty, try anyway" and I try to live by that.
Rest and reset when need to - I'm a true believer that during these crazy fast-paced lives of today we should take a step back to rest and reset when life gets a little too much. Personal activities for that vary a lot but include going for weekend getaways somewhere in Europe as well as enjoying simpler tasks like spending time in my flat away from screens and just enjoying a cup of tea, reading a book or having a looong meditation session. How often do we get so caught in our lives and what's going on around us that we become overwhelmed and tensed? Let's change that - trust me, it's simpler and more straightforward than we think.
Focus a bit more on ourselves - let's prioritise our needs and leave the externalities for another day. We deserve so much more than we tend to think! 😉

Obviously you may or may not relate to all of these and, even better, think that are many more ways to love ourselves. That's understandable and really great! Now go do these! Live your life with a purpose, your purpose! Dream big and reach for the stars 🙌🏼

Hope you enjoyed this post,
Christopher 😊

PS. Have a splendid Christmas, the best and most joyous time of the year ☃️🎅🏼🎄