Reflection, my favourite me time

To help you reflect in a structured way and enter 2018 with clear head, knowing where you are going and why do you wake up every morning. I love reflection methods and I got a perfect NY gift from my bestie: Lisa Jacob's Your best year 2018 book. It is full of great questions and I'd like to share some of them.

My favourite reflection methods, questions

START. STOP. CONTINUE. 

A great evaluation method that can also be used for personal reflection. With what do you want to start in 2018? What do you want to stop? What do you want to continue doing? Useful for every area of our lives; work, relationships, friends, family, hobbies, health, habits.

My personal examples (will add + 10 in each cathegory):

◘ i will start reading books more regularly and I will schedule two hours every week for reading

◘ i will stop worrying about things that don't really matter, such as people that suck my energy or deadlines that are "urgent"

◘ i will continue doing only things I love and I will continue to spend time with people I want to spend my time with

YEAR COMPASS

Great reflection tool: Year compass, online or printable. Grab a cup of nice smelling tea, crawl under your favourite blanket and take time for yourself. On your own or with your friends. I printed this as a gift to my friends in 2016 and I will print it for myself again …

LISA JACOBS: MY BEST YEAR 2018

I love the concept. You need to reflect first and only than you can set the goals – makes perfect sense for me. Some of the questions that helped me immensely: 

·       How commited are you towards achieving your goals?

·       Which decesion that would improve your life quality a lot have you been postponing?

·       Are you better of now than you were a year ago in those five pillars of life: emotional, phisical, mental, financial, relational?

·       What was the time well spent in 2017?

·       Which obstacles did you overcome in 2017?

·       What are your main priorities in life?

·       If this moment was a dollar, are you burning or investing it?

·       What are you afraid of?

You greedy little thing

My 2017 give back project: 10 %

Last year Ranga from Sri lanka approached me about his mother, that had a cancer at the time. At first I thought - omg, we met travelling and now you are asking me for money? Really? A few days later I changed my perspective. Why wouldn’t I help? I have connections, resources and a few hours of my time. I wrote a blog and managed to raise 1000 EUR which helped his mother immensely. It felt really great that people responded (some also didn’t and I admit, I was judging, but in the end - it’s their decision, their money). I loved receiving pictures with Ranga’s mother getting better and better - due to medicine they could buy with money from Slovenia. HELL YEAH! The best thing I did in 2016 I believe …

In 2017 it’s again time to give back. I feel privileged and I want to share. I would feel guilty if I wouldn’t share anything. Hey, but maybe that’s just crazy me, ha? Since I am super exhausted, I decided for an easier way to help others this year. I’m inviting you to join me in 20 % campaign. I’m donating 20 % of my salary to Botrstvo. It is really easy and it took me 3 minutes: DONATE HERE. You can adapt the % you wish to donate to your life situation. 

Excuses - why people don’t donate - are pure bullshit. One of my favourite TED talks actually talks about this, watch it here.

·       NGOs are not spending the money well.

·       My money will be stolen and it will not actually be used for a cause X.

·       I don’t earn that much.

BLA BLA. You are GREEDY. GREEDY! I am sorry to say this, but most of the people I know could donate 20 % of their salary. You can donate - YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO. I (kind of) get it - you don’t feel responsible. You feel that you deserve your money, you worked hard. Sure, we all did. Also the people that couldn’t have a proper NY dinner worked hard. If you are in a situation where you are hardly handling your own bills - of course you’re not donating. Things will get better and when the time is right, you will donate or give back to society in another way.

My experience of freelancing for a year
 

After a year of freelancing I can say that the whole status of course has advantages and disadvantages. If anyone is considering becoming a freelancer, here is my experience.

Things I loved

I loved my work in high season  -for me that was February, March and April. A lot of work, diversity, cool projects, great coworkers. I missed a feeling of belonging to a team and hanging out in an office (yes, I could do coworking, but it didn’t make sense at the time since I wasn’t in the office much). In the summer I worked on a project for 4 months and it felt good since I knew that I will be able to pay the bills. 

Overall freelancing was an okay experience, having “normirani s.p.” (relevant for Slovenia) is extremely easy. You send the bill, no accounting needed, once a month you pay your social taxes and it takes 5 min of your time. It was also great to have a walk on Roznik hill during the day and enjoy the sun in the morning. I loved the flexiblity and feeling of freedom - no need to be somewhere 8 hours per day, every day, in the same place with the same people. I also went to Portugal, where we surfed + worked abroad, so it was really cool to change the office for 10 days and I didn’t have to use my vacation days. I also traveled a lot and attended many educational events - for sure more than 20 days in a year, I think I came closer to 40 days abroad.

Things that sucked

Slovenian freelancing system does not have any security at all. If you get sick, you still need to pay your social taxes and nobody cares about that. In January, I was sick for 3 weeks so you can imagine that I spent more for taxes than I earned. In the summer I went on vacations and obviously, you are not paid in that time. It’s pretty hard to go somewhere for a month - you can lose the clients and you still have to pay taxes (amount with subvention for the first two years in Slovenia is 240 EUR + tax (depends on your income, around 80 eur a month, so all together around 300 - 400 EUR.

I would survive the issue with sick leave and holidays, if my clients would pay the bills on time. They didn’t because in Slovenia we don’t have any security about that as well - the only thing you can do is to go to court and it can take a very long time that you actually get the money or you can hire a company that deals with this and you pay them around 25 % of your bill, which is quite a lot. I worked a lot with ngos, that finance from state sources and I had to wait 2,3 months to get paid and I had to write 10 pages of a report for everything I did - so annoying. I also wrote some articles - horrible experience, I wrote the article in February and got paid in May. And in the end the most bitter experience of all came - when I finished my 4 month project in August, my client didn’t pay my last bill for 2 months. I was so angry and it was draining my energy - with every email reminder about the unpaid bill I felt like crap.

Would I repeat it?

At the moment I am employed for a full time. It’s great because I love the work I do,I have great coworkers and really cool bosses with very modern mentality. They also honestly care about people and make you feel valued, respected and welcome. Of course it’s much less flexible but I’m fine with that for now. And in 10 years? I think I see myself somewhere in between - I want to be a part of the team but at the same time I’d love more freedom and flexibility.

WHY PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS NEWSLETTER

Everyone wants to be happy, right? But it’s far away from easy. I believe being happy is about hard work and lowering your expectations. What is happiness anyway? For me, inner peace, balance and satisfaction with areas of my life I find important. My relationship with Jost, my friends, my family, time for myself, hobbies, sports, health, inner peace, career, personal growth, travelling … That is A LOT of areas I find important and stress in only one area affects all the other areas in your life in a negative way. And luckily, the opposite - a great relationship can also affect your career, relationship with your friends and everything else in a positive sense. I designed Pursuit of happiness newsletter with a few general topics I would like to more or less stick to in every newsletter (let’s hope there will be more than one, haha, I promise nothing) and they will give you an idea about what I’ll be writing. Why a newsletter anyway? Simply because I post way too many things on Facebook and I don’t want my friends mocking me about it anymore. :)

To give you an idea if you want this in your inbox once a month, main newsletter topics:

• Personal deep shit will be about sth intimate or sth I think about a lot,
• Fly, birdie, fly will be about personal growth and how can you become a better version of yourself,
• Wanderlust uber alles will be about travelling tips, ideas, experiences etc,
• Good deeds, good karma will invite you to do sth good for the society, simply because it’s nice,
• Oldies goldies will present a reflection on one of my older blog posts,
• Articles worth reading twice will gather cool articles I find important enough that they make me press share on Facebook

Events worth attending will be a list of interesting events I recommend (and I’m  most likely attending except if I don’t have time), relevant for Slovenia, mostly Ljubljana.