Joinsupermoms

…Even When the New Year Genuinely Doesn’t Start Happy.

It’s the start of the new year and I am grateful to be one of the few lucky people who can genuinely resonate with the new year greetings. I tell myself no matter how difficult things turn, I should see the silver lining, find something positive to make me smile. I like to make a learning or earning opportunity from every situation that doesn’t go my way or walk past it or make it a stepping stone.

Sometimes though, I must admit it’s not quite that simple. I rode on the Paris metro into the city this morning and two ‘metro’ beggars reminded me that. Perhaps they were homeless, I don’t know, but they came desperate, sounding hopeless and leaving me in trauma.

I have a personal rule never to give out cash, just because I want to protect drug addicts from the drugs, I don’t want the cash going to the pimps who sometimes enslave them, or just in case there’s a deeper issue with mental health that this person is battling. So, I was touched to see a passenger hand over her croissant to the second beggar and relieved to find him buttering it as we disembarked.

It made me ask how a healthy person gets to this sad loss of dignity. Is there truly nowhere for street beggars to go?

Well, just like there’s an app for virtually everything, there’s a blog on virtually every subject and I stumbled upon one writer’s excellent response to the trauma I experienced this morning: volunteering and donating through researched charities.

It made me think about volunteering myself. It’s a blog she wrote years ago but I find could still be very relevant, so I’ll share it with you here. Full disclosure: I’m not being paid to promote her site, just sharing a fulfilling reading experience with my readers if you’ve been deeply affected by street beggars like I have and would prefer not to give out cash.

Like I said, I like to make a learning or earning opportunity from every situation. This experience I want to learn from. Yes, volunteering is a definite take-away for me, but I’m sharing 3 additional lessons I am carrying through this year and just because I’m a Supermom and we love a good challenge, I’m setting 3 earning goals for each lesson. I’ll check back with you at the end of this year to see if I reached those three earning goals. You’re welcome to join me and we can try to reach the goals together.

Lesson 1: Anyone can become a street beggar. Each one has a different story, and none should be judged. But a common thread runs through every street beggar not suffering a mental disorder: they did not determine not to be a street beggar. This post presupposes that you do not suffer a mental disorder and are not under the influence of a predator.

It means as mentally healthy persons not in danger, we can choose not to be in certain circumstances. Determine that every day, you will do something that adds value to you. For me today it meant something as generic as taking a shower and brushing my teeth.

It was less in the action and more in the results brought on by the action – reviving myself and sharing my experience in a post. I had been travelling for 12 hours and could barely open my eyes. At 9 pm tonight my daughter who had been travelling with me had a shower and brushed her teeth. I thought, today, I am going to let myself be influenced by that value adding action because it would be reviving.

Earning Goal 1: Revive yourself and earn a new client base. Dig through your treasure trove of transferable skills or services you could offer. Choose one that you are most comfortable with. If you already teach, coach, or offer a service, try reaching out to a new target audience. This could revive your enthusiasm, increase creativity, and introduce you to potential new clients in the future.

To start with, you could offer your service for free for an hour, a day or week. Whatever gives clients the time to discover you and gives you the time to process feedback. As a step further, endorse your skill with a certificate. You could take a free course with certification and earn a certificate to enhance your credibility.

Lesson 2: Life will throw you lemons. As I write, people in Ishikawa, Japan are evacuating their homes and others in hospital after a 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit on New Year’s Day. Everyone will go through a tough time. If you’re lucky and haven’t already gone through yours, prepare yourself for it. Prepare yourself mentally and emotionally. One way is to find genuine spirituality that gives you purpose.

Your lemons might be smaller than another person’s lemons, but I think everybody gets their fair share of lemons. You might get one huge lemon; you might get several smaller ones…Don’t let your lemons be the end of you. Start now to practice resilience or to drive yourself to heal from a past trauma. Understand that life cannot always go your way. Be motivated by people who bounced back from their lemons including abuse, financial reversal, divorce, loss of a loved one or an opportunity.  Force your mind not to be bitter when expectations fall short.

The way we handle emotional trauma could make all the difference between a successful you and a becoming a street beggar.

Earning Goal 2: Earn emotional resilience through constructive criticism. I tend to be lazy with this just because I am constantly on the move and hopefully someone else will do it, yet forward thinking companies ask for it all the time: a review.

In this goal, I hope to earn emotional resilience. This goal involves regularly writing reviews. In each review I force myself to offer a concrete positive solution to every experience, especially a negative one. Think of an experience or product that served you poorly and review it with suggestions. Try not to rant. Remember, you want to earn something good from this experience: emotional resilience. Even if you do rant, be as polite as possible, offer practical suggestions on how the product or service might have performed better for you.

This is an exercise that benefits the seller but also benefits you because you give back and giving is healing. Giving in this way could earn you emotional resilience.

Lesson 3: Surround yourself with people you can look up to. These are people that challenge you positively, people who have reached goals that you set for yourself, basically people you can learn from who are achieving positive results in areas you hope to excel in. Associate with such people as part of a learning experience and to jolt your creativity.

You want to be with people who are willing to share their knowledge and inspire you, particularly as they appreciate the benefits of your energising creativity. I think it forces us to look beyond our worldview, it personally teaches me humility and deepens my social interactions.

Earning Goal 3: Take your mental health seriously to find the best version of yourself. This is the toughest one for me because I can’t seem to see mental well-being as an end goal. Mental well-being must be a continuous ongoing mental state that you can achieve by understanding yourself and navigating human relationships.

Particularly in interacting with people who are more skilled than you are, it means understanding emotional reactions and perceptions. It also means having a balanced view of yourself. Sometimes this means being quiet to listen to the other person and analyse reactions including your own.

Personal development coaches can help with this, and that’s where I conclude my set of earning goals for this year. Working with a personal development coach to unlock my best potential.

As with every new year, 2024 certainly promises interesting new twists and turns, highs and lows. Finding new ways to revive oneself by enhancing existing skills, learning to be emotionally resilient and surrounding oneself with the people who challenge us to be better: these are my thoughts on how to get the best out of this new year.