One Year After Graduation: 5 things to share
According to a study from Harvard and the Asian Development Bank, 6.7 percent of the world's population are college degree-holders. I became part of that 6.7 percent last year Sept 13! It's been a year already and a lot has changed in my life. The year after graduation has probably been my most transformative year.
Transitioning from a student to a graduate is a big step for a lot of people. It's the final transition from teenage life to adulthood. An undergrad life still keeps us safe from the adult life but as soon as we graduate we are out there. We are in the wild. We are an adult. A lot of struggles come in the first year after we graduate. We struggle to find our place in almost everywhere. Today I want to share how my transition went with a few changes that I made in my life that helped me through this first year.
Being happy with failure
This is one of the lessons I got during my 4 year undergrad life. I faced failures before and after coming to Japan. But every failure helped me get better at dealing with failure. I slowly realized failure wasn't the end or something to be sad about. It was part of process, it was the first step. It was about getting over the flinch and trying something. After graduating I continued to be happy with the failures that came my way. My working visa was rejected at the beginning after waiting for 2 months. It came as a shock but I didn't break down. I talked with my company, reapplied and got my visa in a week. Although I started working almost 2 months later than my planned time, I accepted the situation and dealt with it. it's really important to not fear failure, accept it as it comes and move on to get the job done.
Learning to take responsibility
In life a lot of things won't be our fault but it will be our responsibility to handle the situation. We can't never completely predict what life will throw at us. For this reason it's always important to be ready to take responsibility. During undergrad life I blamed a lot of different things for my failures. But towards the end I stopped balming others or the universe and started taking responsibility. What didn't happen, just didn't happen. I stopped wasting time on things that weren't in my control. After graduation I decided to take responsibility. Take control of things that I could control. Make some positive changes in my life.
Building better habits
That mindset of taking responsibility of taking responsibility helped me build better habits in the past 1 year that I am really proud of.
Early riser: I was never consistent in waking up early in the morning. I always wanted to change this bad habit but I always put it off for the future like everyone else. After starting my job last November I started building up this routine of waking up at the same time every single day. Although my job starts from 1pm, I didn't want to slack off. I practiced for the months of Nov and Dec. Then from January I started to build this habit. I found out that waking up was easier if I had something to look forward to every morning. For this reason I built a morning routine. Wake up, make my bed, brush and get fresh, make myself breakfast and enjoy the morning. I also added meditation to this routine slowly in the coming months. This habit has influenced my daily life in a positive way. I have this line I tell anyone who is thinking about becoming a morning person, ''If I win my mornings, I win my day''.
Running: I always wanted to be a runner in order to become more healthy and active. I talk in detail about this on my blog about running. But in short, I started to practice running right after starting my job. I did some short runs but then my friend Mitch guided me on my first 8km run. In February I did a monthly challenge of running every single day for 1 hour. I completed more than 170km and lost more than 10kg! That's the month I fell in love with running. I now run almost 5-6 days a week. Whenever I get time, the weather is nice, I feel like running. This habit has helped me sleep better, breathe better and has increased my stamina throughout the day. I feel more active and healthy which was my goal with running.
Reading: In the past whenever someone used to tell me about reading, I would just say reading is not for me. I don't know how this mind got built in me. During my childhood I actually liked reading a lot but it somehow got lost during high school. Probably due to the pressure of academic reading. But this was also one habit I wanted to restart. I read 6 books at the end of last year from November. It was the first I read more than one book since 2010 I think. But that was just the start. This year I have already completed 35 books this year. I realized physical books were a bit hard for me to start with. So I started reading pdfs on my laptop. I slowly added a few physical books. Currently I am reading Ikigai!
Other than these overall I feel more happy, energized and healthy. Lots of small steps that have influenced these big changes.
Living in the moment
Another big mindset change was learning to live in the moment. This was possible thanks to the practice of meditation. I started meditating in January. I did it continuous for the next few months. I combined it with my running. I would go half way into my run meditate and did the other half. This practice helped me listen to the thoughts in mind and taught me to live every moment and be present. This is something I lacked in the past. Too many things were going on in my life and I never stopped and listened to my thoughts. It's a scary thing to do at the beginning but it's really important for us to do this. This one change has really helped in this crazy year. Due to the pandemic, just like everyone else, I faced some unique challenges. But living in the moment helped me get through it.
Finding Clarity
The final point I would like to share is about finding mental clarity. This is connected to the point I just talked about. Listening to our thoughts and clearing our minds. That has helped me find my place in the world and find mental clarity. I have been able to embrace a minimalistic lifestyle. I realized that I was always a minimalist but never embraced it as a lifestyle. But in the past year I have slowly embraced minimalism and it has helped me live my life on my intentions. This kind of clarity of the mind is really important as we transition from one phase to another.
Thanks for reading this far. I hope this helps anyone out their on a similar journey. if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me!