Good morning and what a fine Monday morning it is. I hope that everyone had a wonderful weekend and has some stories to share or memories that were made.

I enjoyed the weekend. Grabbed myself a book, listened to some music, and ate some tasty food. I still have not finished the book; however I am hoping to finish it at lunch today. The book in question is called “Mistborn” by Brandon Sanderson. If fantasy is a genre you find enjoyable, by all means give this book a try.

A thought that I had over the weekend was about relationships and the past. I do not just mean relationships that only existed as a boyfriend or a girlfriend, but also family and friends. Looking back and I would say that most have had similar experiences, that at one point or another you did not get along with a person who was close to you. A tiny issue or a full blown argument, regardless of what the problem was it happened.

Those situations and circumstances sometimes lead to a falling out between the two parties. That in itself is sad realization, knowing that a part of you has been cut out of your life.

You don’t stop loving someone just because they hurt you. It would certainly make things easier if you did.

Have a wonderful Monday, stay positive and I will talk to you guys soon.

Morning readers,

When looking outside the window, and taking in the view, everyone has a different perspective on what they are seeing. We can always choose to perceive things differently. We can focus on what’s wrong in our life, or we can focus on what’s right. Take a walk and change the environment, then reflect. Sometimes a simple walk down the city block is enough of a change to bring new light to a decision.

Enjoy the day, and enjoy the weekend.

Morning.

The day so far has been a slight bit on the wet side due to the rain clouds rolling in, but I think it is a perfect time to talk a bit more in depth about stress.

I hit on this a little bit with my last post. Mostly in regards to how taking a step back and breathing can help give you clarity. A lot has to do with stress and what most people stress over, and the problems that are caused by stress. Now before I even begin talking about the topic at hand, I just want to say that everyone experiences stress differently. We are all different in our own ways. So with most of the information you read on the internet, or hear in a day to day life, analyze the situation and how it applies to you.

So let’s talk stress.

We all find certain events in life to be stressful. Small events all the way to the large, we are able to find something that will cause us to stress. Now stress is in a way a double-edge sword, at least it is to me. Since you are here reading about my life experience and how they affect me, it only seems fair that I talk about how stress gets to me.

I like most, or at least in my opinion, deal with stress the best that I can as it comes up in my life. One of my methods of dealing with it is exactly like I described yesterday which was to breathe. The exercise normally helps me in cases where the stress is related to a small event in my life, such as stepping on a Lego. (Let’s be real though, stepping on a Lego is more anger than stress.) For the more serious stressful events in my life, I do not try to breathe and clear my mind and gain clarity. I use the stress as a tool to better myself.

How am I able to better myself? Well a pretty good example of this is looking back at this past few months of my life. I was living out in sunny California, enjoying life and the lack of anything that was rain and or water. But while enjoying life I was working with a good friend trying to make some money creating mobile games. I learned a phenomenal amount from working with him but that was not where the stress came from.

Anyone who tries to create a mobile app and make a living off of it will tell you that it is not the most reliable source of income. It is very unlikely that you will be stumbling across the next flappy bird or angry birds. However, it does seem like there is something with birds. Hmmm, food for thought. Anyways, the stress came from lack of a solid income. So what did I do? I used that stress as a motivator. To push me to not only learn more about the field that I was taking part of, but to also give me that drive to find that job to bring me that security of a steady income.

Granted a lot of can be said about the perspective that someone sees when they look at the stress. For me, using it as a fuel to not only push myself to find that job, it also helped me really figure out what I wanted to do with my life. If it was not for the discovery of this stress, I would not have had a much clearer picture of what I wanted to do with my life.

I had talked about this a bit before in an earlier post. However I want to bring it up again, how using stress as a positive influence was beneficial to me. The root cause of the stress was mostly from me worrying about finding a job. At first of course it was slowly forming from interviews that I had with companies in the area, stressing about will I be prepared enough to answer any questions they may have. So I made sure to set aside a few hours each night leading up to the interviews going over material that related to the job. When the positions and interviews did now work in my favor, the stress began to build.

As stress builds it can cause all sort of side effects, and everyone experiences them in a different manner. For some they may have a craving of chocolate. Others may end up with a feeling of restlessness. Myself, I had a few bad acne outbreaks and the loss of sleep.

One of the worst problems that I have found with stress in my life or at least how my body handles stress, is that my mind is constantly running, thinking about all the different scenarios and trying to find a plausible solution. In the case with the interviews, I had many nights where I couldn’t sleep because I was up all night going over the material in my head. (I can comfortably explain the difference between c# and java programming languages at this point.) This of course leads to having the thoughts of “what do I do if I don’t get this job?”, and of course like all stress that builds up, that is also left unmanaged begins to wear away at a person.

That is exactly what happened to me. I had been so stressed out about finding a job, making money, pushing myself, that I never took the moment to sit back and really examine what it was that I was doing to cause this much stress. Once I started to take a step back, breathing and reflecting on what I have done did a lot of the stress start to go away.

A big factor was of course the field of work I was pursuing. That is for another time to go into; however it is very stressful and bare little job security. Another was not living the healthy lifestyle. So on and so on, I discovered more about myself as I reflected upon the interviews, and life choices that I had made the past few months.

So…what then?

I learned a lot about myself. Who I was and what I want to do. All this was brought upon by the stress that I was encountering. By sitting down and really fleshing out the root cause of why I was getting stressed out allowed me to find ways to solve the issues. Allowed me to narrow down the field of jobs to something I would love to do but still give me that work life balance that I spoke about in an earlier post.

There are lots of things in the world that people stress over, and I am of the opinion that having a little bit of stress is not horrible.

But remember to breathe and take a look at your surroundings. If you have a year left of school, and you are beginning to worry about finding a job and it is stressing you out, take a deep breathe and start laying the foundation to help with that issue. Use that little bit of stress to not only motivate you but to solve that problem. As long as you are able break the situation down, it becomes much more manageable.

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal. Work hard towards that goal and be proud of what you have achieved.

See you guys tomorrow.

Good morning, and happy…err…Wednesday.

Kind of forgot the day, it has been a rough morning so far. Need more tea in my life.

So I wanted to do a quick post this morning, and it relates to the title. I want to talk about breathing, well, more about what breathing can help with.

Breathing can help with an enormous amount of problems that may come up as you go about day to day. Other than the obvious, breathing to stay alive, but breathing can be an amazing form of stress relief.

So if you are stressing out about life, school, work, just take a moment, take a deep breathe, hold it in for a few seconds, then release. Do so as many times as needed. Clearing your mind and taking the moment can help give you that moment of clarity that will allow you to formulate a response to a debate, or figure out a situation that you have found yourself in.

That is it for me today, see you all tomorrow.

Happy Tuesday, or to some the second Monday.

I had been thinking about more what I had written up yesterday. Just developing that thought a bit more and I thought looking at the other side and talking about depression, shyness, anxiety would help bring it to a much more fleshed out state.

This world is full of people who attempt everyday to challenge themselves or to help others overcome a problem that they may be facing. I like to believe that I am one of those people who go above and beyond to help someone find a job, find clients for their start-up, lend an ear when they need to speak, and encouragement about decisions that have been made. Myself, and many others share the same satisfaction of being able to step in and provide a helping hand.

However it is not all sunshine and rainbows. I have come to terms with a lot of events that have happened to me in the past. Realizing that I enjoy helping people not just for that small genuine feeling of doing a good deed or earning that pat on the back. Those are by products and take away from the actual message that I think is over looked.

I believe that the saddest people always try their hardest to make others happy because they know what it’s like to feel worthless and not wanted, and they do not want anyone else to feel like that.

Sitting down and really thinking about a lot of the interactions I have had in the past, the above statement holds true. I had reached out not only to distract myself from my own worries but to also help others avoid the same mistakes that I had made to lead to the position that I had been in currently. When people reach out and offer to help pick you up off your feet, or a friendly bit of advice, remember that we are all human and we all experience life in different ways growing our experience in how we interact and push forward with ourselves retaining the knowledge that we have gained.

Everyone is battling a war inside, some are small and others are on a much more massive scale. Try to keep the thought of that in mind when you see someone reaching out to help.

See you tomorrow.