Photo by Arshad Sutar

What’s My Story

It’s almost that time of year. Christmas Day. Seemingly the day that everyone is anticipating. Some anticipate it because of the gifts, some because of spending time with family. There are multiple other reasons people use for this season.

So where does my story fit in this?

For me Christmas is a celebration of the fact that God sent his son Jesus. As the saying goes Jesus is the reason for the season.

This past year has been a year where He has shown me so many things. I have grown as an amateur human, as a Christian, as a mother, as a friend and many more.

So tomorrow and the days after, when you’re going about celebrating, remember the reason why you celebrate, and go about it abundantly. 

Be blessed!

Embrace Change

• Start with acknowledge
• Face your fears
• Be flexible 
• Include yourself 
• Communication!

Photo by Pixabay

Do you Embrace change?

As this is custom, I’ve done some research on embracing change before writing this and wauw! There are many many MANY articles out there to encourage one to embrace change and how to do so.

This then leads to self-examination: do I embrace change and go with the flow? Well. You would think that as an entrepreneur you kind of have to embrace change because that is the driving force of your business. And, in my business that’s exactly true. I embraced change in systems, love new technology for example, being an early adopters in new things (not in old things there is a difference!) and overall going with the flow is easy.

Not so much in ‘real life’ I’ve come to notice. And as has been the trend since starting the blog, I now am consciously choosing to embrace the changes that come my way. Because I had to face the fact that there is zero influence (hey! here’s that word again!) that I have on certain circumstances in life (my kids for example wake up happy or sad depending on their disposition that day). So if I struggle against it, then it’s more work for moi! 

So come 2020 this is the new me. Embracing the changes which are bound to come regardless if I want them or not. And guess what the word embrace also means? It means supporting something enthusiastically. And that’s just what I’m gonna do. Let’s GO!

Who influences you?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with some teenagers the other day, and the level of conversation both astonished me in the positive sense, as well as left me pondering about who their role models are.

Now I’m not eluding to these particular teenagers, but to teenagers in general. I’m just going to put my findings below just to be able to ‘air’ them because truth be told I am troubled.

Let’s start with the level of conversation first. Smart, sassy and classy are words that I use to describe them. They know what they want academically, they were confident in their knowledge and where they wanted to go. So yay! Right? Well yes!

Then the conversation turned to life itself. Now of course these are kids below the age of 20 so they haven’t done much yet. And we’ve all been there: we thought we knew everything. So in this respect they were no different. But when the topic moved from academic to emotions, spirituality, exercise and the most troublesome of all for me: entertainment, that’s where my positive astonishment turned upside down into full worry zone. 

I’ll illustrate. At one point in time, the TV was on just for background noise. As I was positioned in front I asked if it could be turned to something else. Call me old (Fashioned if u will) but I have no need to watch naked women parade around semi aroused men all day. Sorry. 

To be clear, I said: I want to watch something which has NO VIOLENCE, and is just chill. What do they put the Tv on? A movie called Savage. Now I don’t watch TV so I don’t even know what it’s about. But I heard chain saw, I heard thuds, I saw bloodied whimpering people on their knees. I’m sorry but how is that for NO VIOLENCE and chill? When remarking on this, I’m told “oh but it’s nothing!”

So, I tried to explain what desensitized means to no avail. “Oh no that’s not happening to me!” So I told them to put something else on. And they put on a Series called “Locked up”. MY GOD IN HEAVEN! That was not fun to watch AT ALL! Human beings becoming less than humans, money rules, blood all over the place and people losing sense of right and wrong. It’s no wonder they have no empathy, sympathy or any type of other “pathy”. 

So the question then becomes… who influences you? Who influences these children when we are not there to monitor them? 

Ok I’m done ranting. Had to get this out of my system pfew! What do you think about being desensitized? Do you see the effects in people around you or even in yourself? Talk talk talk! 

Excel Dashboards

• Stories
• Analysis
• Excel is sexy!

Photo by PhotoMIX Ltd.from  Pexels

Excel Dashboards

When creating a dashboard in Excel, the idea behind it is that you want to tell a story.  Whomever, who opens up the spreadsheet can then see your story. And of course, stories are there to be told beautifully.

Now there are different ways to go about telling your story. Look at the data, find correlations, trends and the likes and go about telling the story of how the client did in the past. There is much that can be done with past data. You can award your most loyal client (simple example). You can clean up your system of junk (Garbage in garbage out). You can determine your efficiency. And so the list goes on.

But what about predictive analysis? “Making predictions about the future” sounds a bit like looking in a glass ball does it not? Well, there are many techniques that can contribute to making [business] predictions: data mining, statistics, AI to name a few. The patterns seen in the past data can be used to identify risks and opportunities in order for the business owner to know which path he could choose. All to make his story more beautiful!

Try at least not to make the three mistakes as illustrated above!

Have you given telling stories a try? No? Need help? You DO KNOW where to find me do you not?  As usual tell us what you think!

music and melodies

Is there a difference between these two?

What about a song? For me… to simplify things, I think about music as a whole. A composition consisting of multiple players making something together.

I think about melodies as something that can be expressed by just one thing, one instrument or even through use of vocals.

But then songs and notes are somehow left in the dust as how to explain those? 

Can you share your thoughts? Let us know below!

Mathematics

• Promote logical thinking
• Pushing my boundaries

Mathematics Tutor

Since 1990 the love for mathematics was born. This was somewhere in HAVO 4, where I understood the amount of zip of Mathematics. 

This lack of understanding actually drove me one trimester to push myself to get to the bottom of what math really was.. and that’s where love came into the picture. Mind you: not love at first sight 😀

Somewhere around 2010-ish, I said no more! I will no longer tutor because the kids were becoming way smarter and therefore my skill set was easily replaceable by Google.

Or so I thought. Great my surprise a few months ago, when I was approached to tutor again and even greater my surprise when I actually liked it too! So now, within 4 short weeks I’m now again at tutoring part time (2 students of which one lives in the Netherlands even… say hello technology like zoom) and loving it.

Do you do something just because you love to? Share with us!!