Joy

Happy Monday! No doubt, this quarantine is a mental battle. It is so easy to fall in a negative mental state. Sign #1: You'd want me to stop saying Happy Monday. Sign #2: You think that would solve anything. First of all, let me virtually hug you. What you are feeling is valid and you have every reason to be worried. Everything we know is certain no longer feels certain. You are thinking about your job, your finances, your responsibilities, your productivity, your family and their health most of all. You and I are no different here. I hug you in unity because I feel that way too. I apologize if it seems that my positivity is toxic. People who know me most knows how much of a worrier I am and I have to catch myself many times in a day to keep me from being myself. Which brings me to my second point. I refuse to feel helpless and overwhelmed by incubating negative thoughts. Why? 🎯  I'd feed fear and it grows, resulting to panic that clouds my judgment. 🎯  Anxiety...

Happy Monday! Be a role model. You know how we can beat this "new normal"? Model the behavior you'd want to see from your leaders, trusted friends, business leaders, mentors. Be a role model. We are all afraid, anxious, uncertain. Its natural and understandable. Accept it and courageously collect yourself (spend time in prayer and talking to positive people to give you a different perspective) and move. Yes, action is the antidote to stress. When we do something about the things we worry about, we release stress. How? In this lockdown? 1. Act with presence of mind, especially among your kids. Communicate the situation but communicate plan of action. Involve them in planning your meals, in strategizing for safety and sanitation, budgeting, planning daily activities to make their time productive. 2. Engage in online efforts to bring help to those who need us the most: our frontliners, the homeless, those who are out of work and source of income. There ar...

Happy Monday! I have been dreading to write that line all week at the risk of sounding insensitive. Yet, here I am declaring it. Just because...we find what we seek. Though it is easier to wallow in uncertainties, we can be the better person who labor to climb up the ditch and seek to "make sense" of all that is happening around. Sense-making is one requirement of resilience. It is inherent in sense-making though, that we recognize that not everything will make sense now, but it will in the future. Meanwhile, what do we do? 1. Be present in the experience. Be aware of your thought processes, your feelings, your decisions. From what feeling (fear, hope, anger, love) are you operating on? How are your decisions affecting you and the people around you? Every experience teaches us a lesson. Pay attention or you'd have to learn it again. 2. Define who you are in the situation. We may not have control over the situation, but if we are aware, we know that our resp...

Happy Monday! Don't we all want to have a super power? One of my elementary friends once told me, "Matanda ka na nung mga bata pa tayo eh". That is true. I always felt I was an overthinker even then. I feel deeply. I ruminate on events to sap it out of its essence. I always want to make sense of what is happening around me. I want to know what is important in them and keep only that. Not always a good thing but it is what it is. Why? Because I know pain. I know my pain is not known to many. I have wounds I do not show. I own them. I treasure them. Its my secret power to bear them. I look at others and I say to myself, "they don't know how strong I actually am just to stand here smiling." My wounds don't make me weak. They are my gifts. They made me who I am. They make me look at myself everyday and say "Not everyone can look at themselves in the mirror, flawed physically, emotionally and spiritually and live as you do, way to go gi...

Happy Monday! I am tired. I heard this statement said to me more times last week than usual. I spoke to people who are tired physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and for good reasons. Welcome to the reality of the whirlwind. Whirlwind is what we call our day to day activities that consumes most of our energy. The whirlwind could snatch from us energy that we could otherwise put into more directed, intentional goals. Don't we know the whirlwind all too well? Physical Whirlwind: Our daily tasks, commute, household obligations, office work. Mental Whirlwind: Our worries, self-doubt, regrets, dreams that we feel helpless to pursue. Emotional Whirlwind: Our problems, our yearnings for events and people we have little influence in, our emotional needs, our feeling of hurt Spiritual Whirlwind: Despair, guilt, spiritual dryness All of these are life's realities and they all seem urgent and important. In some cases, we may not have direct influence on cha...

Happy Monday! Early this year, I made a decision that changed the course of my company, Xperience Travel. I partnered with AT&D Travels and we are now  AT&D Xperience . Instantly, I knew that I couldn't have merged at a better time, with a better company, or with a better group of people. A shared vision and excitement over wanting to promote Xperiences, especially in the Philippines, that resonates on a personal level seems to be the common thread that made this decision a no brainer. Case in point. This February 2020, a group of volunteers from Minnesota came to the Philippines for a Medical Mission in Samar. AT&D Xperience assisted in some 50+ volunteer's post mission holiday arrangements, and one of them was Jeanne's. Jeanne is a solo traveler and yesterday, we took her on our signature "Baluarte: The Beginnings of a City" tour of Intramuros. In tours like these, you'd think we tell the story. Well, not always. Jeanne is well trave...

Happy Monday! Edited life, that is what I am aiming at. Discerning the “trivial many” from the “vital few” is soooo difficult in many fronts. It is essential to use this on: 1. Scheduling activities 2. Prioritizing people 3. Choosing opportunities Why is it difficult? 1. Fear of missing out. 2. Fear of being left out. 3. Fear of missed opportunities. Fear is such a strong feeling that it can drive you nuts if you let it rule. When we rid of the fears mentioned above, we rest in the feeling of - ENOUGH. 1. I only have enough time to do things, so I will choose my activities wisely. 2. A few people who will "jump out of their routine to be with me when needed" is just the right number in my inner circle. 3. I can say yes to everything - but I don't need to. When we measure our worth against the accumulation of activities, number of people surrounding us and opportunities on our plate, we forget that we are enough without them. We are not less impor...