Tag: life journey

You’ve come a long way, baby!

As the year is drawing to a close, let’s take this opportunity to look back for a moment. Think about how far you have come since the start of the year. Or if you prefer otherwise – in the last 3 months. Whatever time period you choose to compare against the present moment, you will notice a difference. 

You have learnt a lot, probably acquired a new skill, or stopped doing something else you suddenly discarded as not being good for you. You might have let go of old baggage, transformed an old habit or established a new one.

Either way, you have moved forward. You are a different person than you were before.

Isn’t that the way we need to be looking at our life? How far we have come, instead of regretting how far away we still are from achieving our goals or realizing our dreams?

I believe it is a much better measurement of individual success. One that isn’t apologetic or downplaying the many times when we get it right. One that’s not focusing on our imperfections or the many times we slip.

We all tend to put ourselves down a lot, unnecessarily in fact. Perfection neither does exist nor is it desirable anyway. But it blinds us to the small successes along the way: how often we try and the numerous times we do manage well – which we should be celebrating.  

The important thing is that we keep on trying, and become more aware of the chances life is offering us every day. The chance to choose a different response, and to make a difference by doing it.

We can only try to take the right decision at the time and do our best. How it will turn out eventually is not foreseeable in all aspects and beyond our control. And we only have control over ourselves, not over others or fate. 

Moving through life like this is humble, confident, and so much more joyful.

As Sia is singing in “Flames”:…Go, go, go figure it out, figure it out but don’t stop moving…. You can do this.”

Not so long ago, it was important to me to “get things right” each day – an aspiration to become who I strive to be.

Looking back on it now, I have managed meanwhile to feel happy about the stuff I sometimes do get right, and I don’t punish myself anymore for my mistakes. I accept this to be the normal life of a normal person that tries, trips and falls, learns from it and tries again to do better the next day. 

Tomorrow is always another chance to become “the best version of myself” – that phrase from my online yoga teacher Adriene really stuck with me. 


Sometimes you need to take one step back to take 2 steps forward later.

Buddhist saying

As it stands, I can look back on quite an eventful year. 

In January, I suffered from exhaustion, couldn’t work, felt overwhelmed by my physical and mental situation. 

So, I got help, and as the months passed, I learned to listen to my body, to connect with myself and to slow down. I understood how vital it is to manage my energy well. Realizing my patterns, setting boundaries, learning to give myself more credit and giving me the time needed for healing. 

It’s true: these things just take the time they need, and you cannot accelerate your healing path. In the end, I dropped my unrealistic expectations of what I should or shouldn’t do or who I should be. To just acknowledge my limitations and start out from there was – in a sense – liberating. 

And indeed, things got better with time. To summon the patience and confidence to trust the process while going through it was not always easy for me. When you are in such a the moment, then self-doubts and fear are ever-present.

But most importantly: I decided to make peace with my past. Whatever baggage I carry around is a part of me, my history. There’s no need to hide it or feel bad about it. No need to explain myself. I am enough the way I am. 

Sounds easier than it felt for me at the time. When I listened to Brother Phap Huu (Plum Village podcast “The way out is in”) talking about this concept of embracing your past and your habits, it attracted me instantly as the right thing to do, however, I did not know exactly how to do it. All I knew was I wanted to go down that path.

Turned out that the act of taking this decision was actually enough to set things in motion. Once I decided that was what I wanted, things started to move. I moved forward. It has taken me a long time to get to this point. 

I am still working on transforming my habits and know this will continue. They will not disappear by power of magic. In practical terms: the key is to understand them as part of me, but without handing them the control over my life. 

That’s all. A demystification which might help to put things into perspective. It certainly helped me to make sense of it. (In case you assumed otherwise – Buddhist practitioners are very much down to earth, that’s why their advice is so infinitely valuable.)

Bottomline: It feels good to have learnt a lot about myself this year and to have put it into practice.

Here’s to 2024 – my wishes for all of us are for new insights, more patience with ourselves, equanimity, and the courage to walk our own path.

Embarking on a new journey

Can I embrace the chaos in my head and in my life? Can I live with ambiguity for a longer time period, knowing that it will persist for quite a while? 

This question put to me some time ago while participating in a Zen Buddhist workshop about psychological flexibility stuck with me.

Change takes time. I need to step away from the urge to move fast, and instead set my own expectations. I myself determine what I want, and only need to live up to that.

I already have moved beyond the point of questioning myself whether I can really do it, because I know I can. Why shouldn’t I, honestly? 

What’s so exciting about it: the learning experience, the insights gained and the inevitable transformation. By applying it to myself and others I can really make a difference. The required technicalities will be figured out along the way. 

Finally, I am moving closer to my purpose!

Aim for the sky, but move slowly, enjoying every step along the way. It is all those little steps that make the journey complete. (Chanda Kochhar)

My preference for people enablement was always there, hidden beneath the surface. It came up more than 10 years ago for the first time, when I realized while attending an internal company training, that enabling others is something I really enjoy. I acknowledged this insight, but did not act on it, because at that time there was no need for changing anything. I wasn’t ready to step out of my comfort zone.

Since then, this topic surfaced time and again. During the last 2 years after starting to support a new team in a different business area, I noticed more and more how happy I felt whenever I could enable others.

It was enablement in a very broad sense: presenting and explaining processes, developing concepts and finding solutions together or sharing my knowledge. 

Advising colleagues on how to deal best with their daily challenges, on communication and setting boundaries. Some conversations were very personal. I often recognized my younger self in them with all my struggles, expectations and frustrations.

It always gave me energy and a sense of accomplishment. It made my day whenever these little islands of useful activities were incorporated into my daily agenda. The feeling to have helped someone just a little bit is priceless.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

It is no surprise that only when encountering uncertainty, we become open to new opportunities, We notice things that were always there but we did not pay attention to them before. But now we do.

The human factor is and always has been the most important and most valuable to me. Looking back, it runs like a red thread through my past roles and activities up to the present moment. I realized that what I want to do more of is tied to enabling others and helping them grow.

I reached out to colleagues in a people development role to get their advice and to talk things through. The idea of becoming a coach began to cristallize and got stuck in my head. 

Coaching is different than mentoring or giving advice. What fascinates me about it is how a coach can enable the client to find their own answers and take action.

Starting to research different coaching institutes and tracks I decided – considering the broad area of highly interesting educations – that I definitely want to do more than one. 

It’s your road and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you. (Rumi)

Would I be any good at it? Could I really be successful at it while working on improving my own communication skills? The voice at the back of my head was there, but not loud enough to hold me back. 

Doing what I enjoy and consider so worthwhile is not going to be necessarily easy – but that is not the point nor could it ever be an obstacle. Embarking on this path feels like the only worthwhile option. 

Encouraging others to uncover their full potential, to become aware of the solution that lies inside them. Giving them an impulse to change perspective and free themselves.

Everyone has a superpower

Of course, we all have our own struggles in life and we do not have to be perfect. We are real people dealing with real life.

In fact, our struggles are our super powers because they make us human and authentic. What we go through in our own lives shapes our self-awareness, enabling us to help others approaching their challenges better.

The education itself will be a big learning experience and a personal transformation for sure. Doing what really matters and is so much needed in the world is a very strong driving force for me.

You are your only limit

Now I am wondering why I didn’t realize earlier where my journey needs to go. But it proves once more how important it is to allow ourselves the time it takes to figure out our own special path to follow. Finding clarity and direction is a process.

The answer always lies within us – by being open and exploring we can uncover it and bring it to the surface. How happy I feel since this door opened is a clear sign that it’s the right thing for me to do.

And of course, I do not have to figure out all the next steps ahead straight away. They will become clearer to me once I start walking on this new path with confidence and joy.

The key to realising a dream is to focus not on success but significance, and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning. (Oprah Winfrey)

Discovery, awareness and choice – that is what coaching is about. 

Discovering yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, your struggles and their root causes, becoming self-aware, and deciding how to move forward.

Find the answer that lies within you.

The balance between hope and despair

The concept of fairness is deeply ingrained in us. Like a red thread running through our lives, a structure that makes it easier to find our way – a Northern star guiding our decisions.

It determines how we treat others. For most of us, it is self-evident.

But sometimes we hit a wall. Something happens that suddenly throws us off balance. We lose a loved one. We lose our job. Accidents happen, disaster strikes, we get seriously ill… 

This can trigger a reflex making us ask: why me? What did I do to deserve it? Could I have prepared myself better, or somehow prevented it?

Interestingly, we think that we are somehow responsible, beating ourselves up for it, instead of acknowledging that this is just life – a random event happening which never follows the principle of fairness. 

To be a good person striving to do the right thing is unfortunately no guarantee to prevent bad things from happening to us. Fairness is rather an expectation we carry around: an expectation that life should be fair, if we just take the right decisions and behave in a just manner.

The frustrating realization that the world is actually not fair shows the deep disappointment we feel when someone else (or the universe for that matter) doesn’t keep their part of the (expected) bargain. 

We expect the world to be different. We even raise our children to act in a fair manner, to treat others well – like we want to be treated ourselves. And it’s in fact our children who remind us by shouting out “that’s not fair” that they indeed have a very good sense of how things ought to be.

It also triggers a deep fear when realizing that what we took for granted is suddenly caving in like a house of cards. We feel that we lose control falling into a bottomless pit. It is scary. It is threatening. That’s why the reflex in us is so strong to deny it: we are trying to run away from our suffering.

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. (Thich Nhat Hanh)

It takes courage to embrace our suffering, to endure a difficult and painful situation and not give up. Especially when it is challenging our beliefs and our inner framework. It can happen anytime and to everyone, and we cannot prepare ourselves for it.

It helps to understand that bad events happening to us are a part of life.

But our inner values and principles which are guiding us, are another part of it. 

These two are not mutually exclusive but rather different companions on our life’s journey. We will encounter the whole spectrum of it all the time. And we cannot expect to have one without the other.

The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope. (Barack Obama)

But what we can control is how we deal with what comes our way. The world becomes what we make of it, and that’s visible every day. 

Everything we convey through your actions or inaction, each word we say or don’t, each act of kindness or the opposite, changes the world. It makes a difference. So, let’s become more aware of how much influence we actually have. On others and on ourselves.

Does a bad thing happening to me make me question my approach in life? Does it make me lose my faith in myself and others? In humanity?

Would I throw my beliefs overboard?

I believe that hanging on to what is guiding me in life is even more important in such testing situations. There is a reason for why I have decided long ago to live my life based on certain principles.

What we can do:

  • Moving through it with patience and compassion for yourself is very important, in whatever sort of such situation you are. To have others supporting you is wonderful, but don’t forget to support yourself in the same way: speak kindly to yourself.
  • Ground yourself, calm yourself down, simply to avoid your nervous system going into overdrive. Meditation and breathing exercises can be a very powerful tool to help.
  • Cry when you feel like it. Once you stop you will notice that the earth has not opened up and swallowed you. You are still there. And then allow yourself time and space to heal. 

Nothing is as important as my peace, my joy. I smile to everything, even to my suffering, my difficulties. That is a practice of freedom. (Thich Nhat Hanh)

It is hard to lean into our pain, while staying confident and trusting ourselves at the same time. But it is important not to ignore the pain. Acknowledge it, but at the same time do not give up hope. Savour the precious moments of joy in your life.

We have every reason to trust that we can move through the hardships in life. Because there is constant change – in either way, hence also to the positive.

Trust yourself.

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If you are interested in meditation and finding inner peace, I can recommend the Plum Village App.

The podcast “The Way Out Is In” offers profound, insightful conversations based on Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings of Buddhist philosophy.