Taming Monkey Number 7 – At Leisure

It’s time for my monthly taming monkey report. If you don’t know what is that taming monkey thing, I suggest to read the introductory post. To make a long story short, I ditched my new years resolutions and replaced them with monthly challenges. During these monthly challenges, I intend to tame an inner monkey. Like in a “monkey type” behavior, not a real monkey, of course.

At Leisure

The July monkey was to deliver a few astrological readings to people I promised that, but never got the chance to actually deliver. I do this astrology thing on a regular basis for myself and it proved to be a really reliable companion. I won’t go into details about this now. From time to time, I also do this at social gatherings or parties, just for fun. Every time I do it, I end up with at least a dozen of requests to do extended readings.

I don’t consider myself a professional astrologer and I do not intend to “become” one. I just learned this the same way I learned Objective C. Out of curiosity, that is. In fact, pretty much everything I learned so far was out of curiosity. So this challenge didn’t have any “work” or “professional” pressure, it was just a casual thing.

Out of 10 charts I only delivered two. One must say that the monkey was not tamed. And one must be right about that. But I don’t feel any negative emotions about that. No guilt, no frustration, nothing like that. In fact, I feel pretty relaxed and happy.

The whole month was more like a leisure break. In the Northern hemisphere, where I am right now, it’s holiday season. Many of my friends were out on holiday, and I myself spent like almost half of the month outside work. Almost a week in Switzerland and a few days at the Black Sea seaside (each time with one of my kids). And the rest was more like keeping afloat some of my projects instead of pushing them. One of the closest projects at this moment is WPSumo (expect to hear more about it soon). But even WPSumo was more like waiting for something to happen than pushing things to actually happen.

Results?

I said it before and I will say it again: this taming monkey challenge is one of the best thing that I did this year. The benefits are so deep and extended, that I can hardly believe where I am right now, compared to where I was at the beginning of the year.

And the most interesting part of the entire experience is the fact that the effects are not direct. They’re not like a direct consequence of what I do. Instead, there are places inside my life that gets activated almost magically, when I apply some pressure on a very different spot. For instance, in July, by trying to deliver some astrological charts, I activated that part in me that was ready to enjoy holiday.

Believe it or not, that part was drastically underdeveloped. I worked since I finished school, and always took a lot of pride in it. Work was one of my most frequently used social masks. Who are you? I’m a radio anchor. Who are you? I’m a self-made entrepreneur. And so on, and so forth…

Being so melted down with my work I always had a very hard time to relax. I only understood the whole process during the last few years. Until then, all I knew was that I don’t feel good on holiday. Now I know it was an identity crisis. And fear that if I leave it unsupervised for just a second, my universe will collapse. Taking my social mask with it.

But during this month I didn’t experience this at all. On the contrary. I felt light and relaxed. Joyful and balanced. Believe me, the outside world wasn’t like that. Business went on as usual, had to solve all sort of blocks, tense situations or just ordinary, day to day chores. But I did it without too much hassle. Even smiling at times.

Is there a direct connection between the July monkey and my ability to enjoy long breaks in my work? Most likely not. But the whole process of “taming monkeys”, of getting out from the mud of my exploding subconscious all the things that I never lived up to, putting them into the light and start to manage them, well, that’s for sure at the root of my improved living ability.

In fact, I am so relaxed that I even had a bit of a hard time writing this post. Like I was just staring at the walls instead.

August Monkey

The August monkey will be “straighten up my finances”. I know it sounds fuzzy and hard to measure, but I have this need for a long time, so I will make it a monkey.

What exactly do I mean by “straighten up my finances”? Well, after I sold my company and gave up my life as a busy manager, I embraced a digital nomad lifestyle. Basically, it means I can make my own schedule, work my own projects and make an office out of a bench on a park, if I want. Cool, isn’t it? But it also means I have a wider spread of my interests, projects and activities. I feel I’m spreading too thin.

If you want to have a glimpse of how I make money right now, have a look at my work with me page. Besides that, I also have a few other revenue sources, like affiliate programs, iOS apps and ebooks selling on Kindle and iBookStore. All this has become a little bit hard to understand, even for me. So I’ll try to make it clearer during August.

That means I can ditch some of my projects, put more energy in others or enforce my presence in some of the partnerships I already started.

We’ll see.

Holiday, New Domain Name, Full Moon and Projects

Starting tomorrow we’ll go on a short holiday. While are still in Romania we thought it would be interesting to have a car trip in Europe, trying to take things easier and see as much as we can. We planned really loosely this trip and even the word “planned” is used in a quite inappropriate context. We just decided it’s time to go, taking advantage of Bianca’s holiday and of the promised good weather. We do have some cities we want to see and a little bit of a plan, but it can be changed anytime. We plan to see Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, a little bit on Austrian Alps and probably some sea side in Croatia. At best, the holiday will be two weeks but we can go back anytime if we don’t like something.

I’m quite happy with this arrangement. Although I had quite a bit of traveling during the first half of the year, it was on my own, without my family. I visited Thailand, Japan and had a short stop in New Zealand too (ok, that was business related, but still). But since the last trip something started to feel somehow inconsistent and I strongly felt the need to be in a warm and welcoming company. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic to travel on your own and feel independent, autonomous but I just had enough of that. I’m not bored, I just need something else.

I do have some scheduled posts for the next week but again, if I will find something interesting to write while I’m still on the trip, I’ll change the order. All in all, expect a little bit of relaxation here. Maybe it was time for it.

New Domain Name

A few days ago I decided to change the domain name from eDragonu.ro to DragosRoua.com. There were a few reasons for that. First of all, it was this gap between what I wrote in the last year and the old domain name. Edragonu was my first nickname on the internet and I had quite a bit of emotional link to it. But what I wrote in the last year was more related to my real persona. It was time to jump from the nickname level to the real life level.

Second, there was this SEO thing that was bothering me from some time. It seems that Google is limiting the searches to a particular TLD by redirecting the searches to the assigned servers. Let me explain: if you have a domain ending in .ro, even the content is in English, Google will assume it’s a Romanian site and it will include it in the Google.ro cluster. Sometimes, some terms were out of it and had quite a good ranking on other search engines, but seemed there were local search engines too, like Google.in or Google.ie. Changing the domain to .com will most likely put the content in the main English clusters.

I know there will be a time penalty until the new domain will be picking up in the search engines index. When I made the change I had an alexa rank of 75.000 which is something way about average. Right now I’m starting from 24.000.000. It’s picking up quite faster though, I think I’ll be back in my old numbers – and even better – anywhere between one and three months. Which is exactly when the holiday will be over and a new season will start.

If you have some bookmarks, feel free to change them to the new domain.

Full Moon

This summer will be really interesting. A few days ago we had a full moon and in the next few weeks will have a solar eclipse (not visible form Romania, only in Asia) and another full moon. These full moons are also mixed with some eclipses. Of course we have full moons every 30 days, but these are specials. There are some interesting astral configurations.

I won’t dive into details here, but these are very special aspects. A lot of violent events took place in the last few weeks and I expect even more to come. I’m not a huge fan, but I can’t but take into account Michael Jackson’s violent death. A few days ago we had an earthquake in Romania, a small one, but we expect replicas. The keyword here is “aggressiveness”. It’s time to release huge energy depots and if you’re not knowing why you’re doing this and try to blame others for your own problems, it will come back in a very strong way. Everything seems to get out of your reach.

This is a time for control and moderation, for clarity and lucidity. Every step made without careful consideration will not only be made in a very aggressive way, but this aggressiveness will come back amplified quite soon, usually to trash something out. There was some turmoil in my neighborhood the other days, involving some big confusions and false problems,  but I’m happy I managed to keep my head clear and let the flood of aggressiveness pass me by. I’ve been there before and I know that any aggressive attack made under these circumstances will come back in a very destructive way.

Projects

In the last few weeks I’ve put together some new projects, a few of them not directly related to this blog. The main one is still related to this blog though, and it will be my first commercial product. I can’t say more at this time but most likely it will be in the form of an ebook. I worked pretty hard during the last 5-6 weeks only to realize that the project will be way bigger than I initially thought. Writing a book is something way more difficult than working on a blog. Regardless of the ebook success – which will, of course, be quite visible – I’m already getting a lot of good vibes only from working on the book.

The other projects are related to the new business I’ve started in New Zealand, and it will be about iPhone programming. There’s no secret that I am a huge fan of iPhone, even before it was launched. Doing some programming for the platform was just a logical step ahead. Learning Objective C can be frustrating at times, but it’s rewarding. I already have several apps outlined and some of them are even in Alpha stage. I expect to have my first apps in the App Store this fall, but then again, time will tell.

One of the iPhone apps will be directly derived from my Assess – Decide – Do series. It will be a productivity application, what we may call right now a task manager, but it will be built upon the Assess – Decide – Do framework.

It was a busy time, as you can see, and what’s ahead is even more challenging.

Which.
Is something.
I love.

Living life like a holiday

We all love holidays, isn’t it? Usually we only need the sound of the word itself to wake up in our brain pleasant emotions and nice memories.

But did you ever wondered what if we could live our entire life as a holiday? Sounds interesting, at least for me, and I’ll try to show you why…

First of all, what is a holiday?

Let’s look at a possible list of definitions:

- at a very general level we can define a holiday as a “break in your current stream of habits”. Using this definition, even a small trip to the mall at an unusual hour could be taken as a holiday. And, in fact, it is.

- another definition for a holiday would be a “reward”, something your receive because you worked for it, because you deserved it, or because, in one form or another, you paid for it. A holiday could be a five minutes break in the middle of a project, or just a beautiful morning in which you make a detour from your regular path to the work, just to see new stuff.

- and another definition could be: “a time for relaxation”, a time in which you avoid your regular work schedule and instead use everything around you to relax, to calm down, to de-tense…

- and yet another definition would be: “a time for adventure”. Most of us are using the holiday as an occasion for being “adventurous”. Being this at the relationship level, by trying to meet new persons or possible mates, or being this at the more physical level of trying to push the body limits in “dangerous” activities: rafting, scuba-diving, and so on

- and maybe the most popular definition of a holiday is “a time for freedom”, a slice of our existence in which we can break the rules, put out the weight from our shoulders and start living without any limitations

You can chose whatever definition seems appropriate to you, or even mix them together. And of course, you can come up with your own definition of a holiday.

Why we would live our life as a holiday?

First of all, because this is what it is. You can take my word for it, try to find arguments by yourself, or try to find them in other places, but believe me, at some point you will realize that this is just a holiday, a season for adventure, freedom and relaxation, a reward as well as a break in your current stream of in-between existences. As new-agey as it may sound, it will be revealed as true at some point in your life too…

But let’s say you disagree with that, why would you live your life like as holiday then?

Because it will give you some more new experiences than a linear way of living it.

Because it will help you break your general approach to the life as an interrupted stream of routines.

Because it will make you smile.

Because it will bring more colors in your life (have you ever noticed the richness in colors of holidays pictures?)

Because it will connect you with a new source of energy, and it will make use that one instead of your regular sources – which, by the way, you know you will drain up sooner or later.

Because it will help you accept your passage through this life, in which you have a beginning and an end.

And, most of all, because it’s so much fan.

Allegedly, if you came this far, it means you do have a tendency of living your life as a holiday, so let’s start exploring some of the ways in which you can accomplish this.

How to live your life like a holiday

First of all, start to smile . It’s holiday, remember, you do have to smile, this is what people do during holidays, they are smiling.

And then, start your day by expecting the unexpected. Like in a foreign country or an unknown new place, you don’t really know what it should happen next, but you are somehow prepared. This is the feeling, start to experience it day by day, morning by morning. Just imagine that you won’t have the same day at the office, or at home, and the order of things will be somehow, in a very intriguing and interesting way, twisted by an uncontrolled event or person.

Then start to look at the things like you usually do in a holiday. You do admire a lot during holidays, don’t you? Try to this every day: admire, be surprised, and allow you to stare from time to time at the world…

If, at any point in your day, you’ll be faced with a challenge, embrace it. Think that you are climbing a mountain, and that challenge is basically the only way you can continue your climbing, if not taking it, you will be, at the very best, stacked in the mountain, if not already descending at an increasing speed. Living like in a holiday is a great way of modeling your risk-taking capacities.

Be kind to other people. If this is your holiday, it is also their holiday too, so why bother to be grumpy or nervous? Just be nice to them, it’s only a holiday, after all.

Living a life involves spending some of your assets in order to receive some goods or services. By living life like a holiday you will try to enjoy your spending. It’s not like you have to go shopping, it’s like you are going to shop in an exquisite shop located in an exotic place. Or if you have to have business lunch, imagine that you are having lunch on the French Riviera. The waiters will suddenly seem to be kind to you, believe me, I tried it, and it worked.

Another thing that you do in a holiday and you don’t usually do in your normal life is to take things easier. Try to make it lighter, whatever should be. Don’t take it personally. And don’t do it on purpose. It’s holiday, why waste precious time by being angry at the world? It just doesn’t make sense.

Forgive more. That one is self-explanatory.

Forget less. While involved in a huge machine of social commitments, of daily stress and struggles, your brain will try to protect you by putting all the unwanted stuff in the darkest places of your mind. But in a holiday you are open, you are eager to see more in order to keep it in your heart, because it’s beautiful. Keep yourself open to new, because, even in an unusual form, the new is always beautiful.

And learn more. If some new task arrived at the office today, and you feel completely helpless, just imagine it’s rafting. Or scuba-diving. Or mountain climbing or horse-back riding. Or whatever thing you thrive to do in your holiday. Because, even presented in this non-appealing form, deep down that new task will add to your positive experiences as much as a holiday scout adventure.

When you know you are living your life like a holiday?

Basically, when you don’t need a holiday anymore .

If you had similar experiences or want to try some of those described here, enjoy and feel free to comment on this.

[tags]holiday, personal development[/tags]